I'm really getting puzzled over the panic level that global warming is getting.
Probably because I took a couple of classes on Earth History and Paleontology. Here's some snippets of things I've learned.
-We're in an ice age. Right now. An ice age is defined as 'having continental glaciation'. Those big sheets of ice on Antarctica and Greenland are what's leftover from the last glacial advance--and, what's more, they've been there for about 1.8 million years. Right now, though, we're well into one of the retreats, but it won't be long in geologic time before the planet chills back down.
-As near as I can make out from the news stories, the 'long term' of sea level rise is, in fact, so long term that people who live in cities that will be flooded from 16 or 17 feet of sea level rise will have time to take apart their cities and buildings, number the pieces, move them inland, and rebuild them in the exact same layout. We're not talking about a ruinous disaster like Atlantis. We're more like Discworld's continent of Ku, which took thirty years to sink and its inhabitants spent most of that time wading and complaining about mud.
-Speaking of sea level rise, there hasn't ever been enough water, if you put all three phases together, to actually flood the planet like you see in Waterworld. We won't be running out of solid ground to stand on. Ever. Especially since the size of the continents is sloooowly being increased.
-The fossil record indicates that when the planet is hot (as it has been for most of the planet's history), life goes "Woo-hoo!" and starts filling in the increased habitable area at a ferocious rate. Sure, the polar bears and penguins might be in trouble...Oh, wait. The Arctic icecap does cover *some* land, and the ice the penguins are standing on is itself sitting on a continent. They'll have somewhere to stand on, and, after that, it's up to them.
-Paleontology can actually tell you *a lot* about the sea level change and therefore the size of the icecaps, thanks to a couple of tricks involving the isotopes of water (or, more specifically, oxygen) and the shells of little-bitty sea creatures. Al Gore can rely on the carbon dioxide locked into the ice sheets if he wants to, but that goes back...what...to beginning of this current ice age? Pretty short term if you want to try to get an accurate picture of what the effects of a hot planet are.
So I guess my point is that I don't doubt that the planet cools down and heats up over periods of time. I don't doubt that we're contributing over it. I do, however, have a mountain-sized doubt about whether global warming will be this huge disaster like it's made out to be, since all the evidence I've seen says we won't run out of habitat and it actually has a net benefit on the amount and diversity of life.
Global Warming!
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Global Warming!
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Username17
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Because normally these shifts take place over hundreds of thousands of years instead of hundreds of years. This means that the generation upon generation required for natural selection to do its grisly business doesn't have time to do that, and then the plants aren't growing where their new ecological niches are and then there aren't any plants.
Yeah, we can adapt to a new climate by just growing different things in different places.But if it doesn't happen gradually, but instead very rapidly we don;t have time to adjust our growing schedules. Then we just get the catastrophic rice crop failures of the last two years.
Agriculture, and by extension human civilization is dependent upon a stable climate. No climate stability, no food. In the big scale, in the geologic perspective, it's no big thing. But we don't live on a geological scale. All of human history doesn't really fit on a geologic scale.
And if we fit geological scale changes into the timeframes of our lifetimes, then you're damn right that we're going to experience mass extinctions and crop failures. Hell,the normal evolutionary process of "adapting" actually is the mass extinction of every single instance of a species that lacks traits adaptable to the new environment. If you just toss the new environment in all at once, a lot of species aren't going to have any instances in their current generation that pass muster.
Gradual changes to the planet are much less harmful to the biodiversity of the planet than are rapid changes. Each species gets many many opportunities during a gradual change to get the right kind of mutations while the old way of life is merely difficult rather than impossible.
Looking at changes that occur over a hundred thousand years in the normal cycle and calling them normal or acceptable when they happen in 200 years is crazy talk.
-Username17
Yeah, we can adapt to a new climate by just growing different things in different places.But if it doesn't happen gradually, but instead very rapidly we don;t have time to adjust our growing schedules. Then we just get the catastrophic rice crop failures of the last two years.
Agriculture, and by extension human civilization is dependent upon a stable climate. No climate stability, no food. In the big scale, in the geologic perspective, it's no big thing. But we don't live on a geological scale. All of human history doesn't really fit on a geologic scale.
And if we fit geological scale changes into the timeframes of our lifetimes, then you're damn right that we're going to experience mass extinctions and crop failures. Hell,the normal evolutionary process of "adapting" actually is the mass extinction of every single instance of a species that lacks traits adaptable to the new environment. If you just toss the new environment in all at once, a lot of species aren't going to have any instances in their current generation that pass muster.
Gradual changes to the planet are much less harmful to the biodiversity of the planet than are rapid changes. Each species gets many many opportunities during a gradual change to get the right kind of mutations while the old way of life is merely difficult rather than impossible.
Looking at changes that occur over a hundred thousand years in the normal cycle and calling them normal or acceptable when they happen in 200 years is crazy talk.
-Username17
I'd have to find the textbook again and check it, but I'm pretty sure the glacial maxima/minima cycles can happen over a few tens of thousands of years. I'm pretty sure we've been on this minima for about 10,000 years, so it should be coming to an end in another couple of thousand. But I'll go to my professors and ask them for the literature before I swear to that.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Username17
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And you don't see the problem when the bands of appropriate climate niches for trees move in a hundred years (1 tree generation) instead of 2000 years (20 tree generations)?
It has a very large impact on the extent and indeed the possibility of forest ranges adjusting their new extents to new climate zones. It is in no way similar to gradually drag a forest rage north, having more trees grow upon one side while trees on the other end die as to simply teleporting the range north, where all the trees die and nothing takes its place.
Normal events at abnormal speeds are extinction level events.
-Username17
It has a very large impact on the extent and indeed the possibility of forest ranges adjusting their new extents to new climate zones. It is in no way similar to gradually drag a forest rage north, having more trees grow upon one side while trees on the other end die as to simply teleporting the range north, where all the trees die and nothing takes its place.
Normal events at abnormal speeds are extinction level events.
-Username17
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Josh_Kablack
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See level for any given coastal city is not constant, and is subject to occasionally rapid variations which can have catastrophic effects on the people living in such cities.As near as I can make out from the news stories, the 'long term' of sea level rise is, in fact, so long term that people who live in cities that will be flooded from 16 or 17 feet of sea level rise will have time to take apart their cities and buildings, number the pieces, move them inland, and rebuild them in the exact same layout. We're not talking about a ruinous disaster like Atlantis. We're more like Discworld's continent of Ku, which took thirty years to sink and its inhabitants spent most of that time wading and complaining about mud.
Even modest rises can necessitate massive infrastructure costs at taxpayer expense. in order to prevent Large Scale Fatalities,
Seriously, even one millimeter a year rise is having catastrophic consequences
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Gosh, I'd think the fact that islands are already flooding and people are dying in climate shifts due to the greater energy and temperatures generally around the world would sorta, I dunno, prove global warming.
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