231–240 of 247 posts
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The real measure should be CO2 output per unit of GDP. We still need to make stuff, so if you're going to release CO2, it better be an efficient use of it.
That's convenient. Presumably you'll stop driving, give up home air con and electricity, never fly anywhere, etc. Because those things aren't related to your GDP production.
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> I'm not entirely sure the Cold War ever ended The 70% nuclear arms reduction from the late 1980s [1] and the collapse of the Soviet Union are pretty definitive. http://www.nukestrat.com/WorldNuclearStockpiles.jpg
For the purposes of mutually assured destruction, you only need to be able to destroy civilization once. With respect to whether a war has ended or not, I'd rather look at the annual defense budget. The US defense budget, as a fraction of GDP, has spiked four times, to 12%, 22%, 41%, and 15% for Civil War (does not include CSA spending), WW1, WW2, and Korean War. Since then, the Vietnam War steadily consumed about 10…
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I take it with a grain of salt because of the title including: "suggests" And what's the projection, will it rise 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 100, 200 or 300 meters in the next 100 years? I have seen so many numbers, I don't know what the current estimation is. Anyway I tried to make sense of the article: " This number has hovered around 0.6 inches per decade since 1900...[]...Global sea level, the paper concluded, rose no less th…
Or can someone explain these numbers otherwise (since people seem to disagree with down-votes)
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For the purposes of mutually assured destruction, you only need to be able to destroy civilization once. With respect to whether a war has ended or not, I'd rather look at the annual defense budget. The US defense budget, as a fraction of GDP, has spiked four times, to 12%, 22%, 41%, and 15% for Civil War (does not include CSA spending), WW1, WW2, and Korean War. Since then, the Vietnam War steadily consumed about 10…
Odd terminology you use: the Cold War started in the late 1940s, sometime around Churchill's coining of the term Iron Curtain, in about 1947.
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Are you aware of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[3] The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasti…
So what? Its not helpful to score points off of what was the 'true' maximum temperature of the planet. Here we are, now, with coastal cities in jeopardy and Antarctica melting. It will affect us, our children and grandchildren (and 100X grandchildren if you are right and it lasts 20,000 years before recovering). I take no solace in thinking "humans will be long gone". Not if its global catastrophe in the next decades…
People have talking about global catastrophe since the 1960's and some of the predictions from the first Earth day in 1970 were so alarmist it's funny to look back at those now:
"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
- Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
"At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt
"Air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
- Paul Ehrlich
"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
- Kenneth Watt
source: http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/barbara-boland/13-worst-predic...
That was over 4 decades ago and we're still here.
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> the end of arctic ice nitpick: it is actually antarctic ice we need to worry about. Arctic ice (except on Greenland) is floating and so it is already displacing its weight in water.
Melting Arctic ice also changes the surface albedo so more solar energy is absorbed, it changes the ocean salinity, and no longer cools the winds above it. Thermal expansion of the ocean contributes almost half of total observed sea level rise. (1.1mm out of 2.8 mm total per year)
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Please see my reply to veeragoni.
Aaaaand it's a bunch of unsubstantiated spiritualist gibberish. Oh well.
Obviously, you're used to hearing similar words to what I said from those who don't know a thing. However, in order for you, yourself, to avoid become a hypocrite, you need to not make the mistake you accuse me of doing. So, perhaps you could present proof that what I shared is unsubstantiated. It's to your detriment to treat it badly without confirmation.
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So what? Its not helpful to score points off of what was the 'true' maximum temperature of the planet. Here we are, now, with coastal cities in jeopardy and Antarctica melting. It will affect us, our children and grandchildren (and 100X grandchildren if you are right and it lasts 20,000 years before recovering). I take no solace in thinking "humans will be long gone". Not if its global catastrophe in the next decades…
> Not if its global catastrophe in the next decades that trigger that. People have talking about global catastrophe since the 1960's and some of the predictions from the first Earth day in 1970 were so alarmist it's funny to look back at those now: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people p…
So yea it seems funny or harmless if you ignore what's happened since.
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I'm afraid it will start emerging much sooner than on a decadal timescale - we're already seeing the impact in terms of crop yields and weather damage costs, all over the globe. Simultaneously, our political systems are gyrating wildly as they struggle to function in an ever faster and more interconnected and complex world. No, I think we're going to see a lot of bad news over the next few years. The impacts of clima…
Crop yields continue to climb. http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/uploads/cereal_yields...