New Zealand Government to declare a climate emergency

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#2619091 10-Dec-2020 08:43

tdgeek:
Dingbatt:

Or you could sit in the corner of one room of your rotting house, with the lights off and no heating, surrounded by no worldly goods having given them all away to a person who convinced you that they could fix your rotting house by putting slightly less jelly on one of the weatherboards. You do have a PV panel on the roof, but it’s night time.

Thats a good analogy for where Earth is going, we will all be crammed in a corner with no heating no power and no food

No there would just be a war eventually and the population would be reduced to fit.

SJB

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#2619103 10-Dec-2020 08:51

Geektastic:

No there would just be a war eventually and the population would be reduced to fit.

I know it's far fetched but there might be a global pandemic that reduces the population significantly. Oh wait a minute.......

tdgeek

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#2619105 10-Dec-2020 08:51

Geektastic:

No there would just be a war eventually and the population would be reduced to fit.

Not really. There will be war, riots as people compete for scarce resources. But they wont be reduced to fit. if there is not enough food or desalinated water there is not enough. Jobs? Income? Nah

MikeB4

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#2619165 10-Dec-2020 09:24

And if the generations alive today don't wake, get real and stop being selfish this is the hell we will bequeath coming generations.

tripper1000

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#2619190 10-Dec-2020 09:35

tdgeek: What you say sounds fair enough but it has a flaw. Natural changes take eons. 200 years massive pumping of gases into our finite atmosphere is not natural and its quick. 200 years is less than a blink in time, yet look what we did in that blink.

It is a statistical thing. The data to support the assertion that climate is on an upwards spike is there, but the data so prove this is set to sustain simply isn't there. However that isn't to say the opposite - the data to prove it isn't on a sustaining upwards trend isn't there either. There are a bunch of co-dependant assertions and assumptions without the data to firmly support it.

In this point, the implied assumption is that natural climate warming (ie post ice age warming) has been increasing steadily for the last 15 centuries and that there hasn't been any brief periods (500 or 1000 years) where the warming accelerates and slows, but there are too few data points to support this one way or the other.

If you assume the change has been steady, then yes, you would have cause to panic. If you entertain the entirely plausible possibility that it is erratic, then there is no concrete reason to panic. In fact, there is data to suggest that it is uneven, but this is minimised, to keep the funding rolling in.

In the middle ages the earth was in a mini-ice age that slowed the natural warming cycle. Right at the point were we started to actually measure the temperature, the world was coming out of this mini ice age, so yes, you see a dramatic but (at least partially, maybe entirely) natural spike upwards in temperature. It just happened to coincide with the burning of fossil fuel which makes to very hard to delineate between natural and man made rises.

We don't even know what drives the ice ages, so how can we know what drives the warming periods in between? The fact is that looking at the geological records we have very few data points to study relative to the time line and local variations, and certainly not down to a 200 year resolution. We do know that the trends take thousands or millions of years to pan out. 200 years of data is literally noise and too short of a period to make any real projections from. So making a projection based on what amounts to an instantaneous snap-shot of data is obviously fraught with peril. It's right up there with predicting how a symphony goes after listening to one single note.

You might be right, or I might be right, but the fact is that it is going to take 1,000 years or more for the facts to be seen and one of us to emerge as correct. I'm not the voice of denial, just the voice of reason.

networkn

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#2619197 10-Dec-2020 09:45

tripper1000:

You might be right, or I might be right, but the fact is that it is going to take 1,000 years or more for the facts to be seen and one of us to emerge as correct. I'm not the voice of denial, just the voice of reason.

Climate hysteria is very popular and exceptionally profitable.

I believe as a species we should be taking steps toward minimizing our impact on the environment as a matter of being decent. I look at the waste and feel ill, even if we could reduce this, it would have quite an impact. The Food show this year, packaging was something I really noticed. We ended up buying things with more packaging than I felt comfortable with, but we had our say to those companies I felt were being stupid about how they packaged their stuff. We have switched to a lot more bulk type food this year, large containers of Yoghurt, no more individually wrapped cheese slices, but it's a two-edge sword. We probably waste more food this way, but less packaging.

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#2619199 10-Dec-2020 09:45

tripper1000:

You might be right, or I might be right, but the fact is that it is going to take 1,000 years or more for the facts to be seen and one of us to emerge as correct. I'm not the voice of denial, just the voice of reason.

The problem with voices of reason is that people of unreason seize on them as excuses to do nothing. If the climate suddenly stops warming all on its own, then all of the mitigation measures will have been for nothing and people can keep driving their SUVs. If it turns out after 1,000 years that the climate really has changed, it will be too late to do anything about it. What is the better course of action? Be cautious now just in case there is a real problem, or party like there is no tomorrow so there really is no tomorrow? I know which one I would choose.

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tripper1000

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#2619200 10-Dec-2020 09:48

The human population exceeded what the earth could naturally sustain in approx the 1940's, supported by increased food production through fertiliser produced from oil. (think of all the dairy farms in NZ on land that was once no good for growing anything except pine trees). Once oil runs out (which will be long before climate change real or not gets us), the human population will stave and balance will start to be restored. Despite this being a far more imminent threat, no one is panicking about this because no one has commercialised that panic yet.

In the bigger evolutionary picture, humans have not around long at all, and probably won't last as long as other species like the humble crocodile. Mother nature has a way of balancing things out.

networkn

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#2619202 10-Dec-2020 09:49

These threads inevitably end up back in where they start. :)

tdgeek

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#2619210 10-Dec-2020 10:01

Yes, you need many many years to see a pattern. Its takes eons, you see minor variations but you dont see spikes that we now have, until now

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/what%E2%80%99s-hottest-earth-has-been-%E2%80%9Clately%E2%80%9D

A spike like this could happen naturally, a period of extensive volcanic events, but it wasn't that , it was us. Yes, 200 years is too short a time to squabble over, but its not a blip

We can see the warm period 7000 years ago, then the Little Ice Age in the 1400's and its been rising lately, but the last 200 years its spiked vertical, to the same as it was 7000 years ago. In 200 years. The correlation between natural changes and what we have added to the atmosphere and measured is pretty stark to put it mildly. Right now, there is usually about one million people flying at any one time, all consuming about 70mpg of fuel. How many cars are driving at any one time using say 28mpg of fuel? That would be staggering, and thats just transport

tdgeek

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#2619239 10-Dec-2020 10:35

Rikkitic:

The problem with voices of reason is that people of unreason seize on them as excuses to do nothing. If the climate suddenly stops warming all on its own, then all of the mitigation measures will have been for nothing and people can keep driving their SUVs. If it turns out after 1,000 years that the climate really has changed, it will be too late to do anything about it. What is the better course of action? Be cautious now just in case there is a real problem, or party like there is no tomorrow so there really is no tomorrow? I know which one I would choose.

It will be less than 1000 years. We have only been doing this for 200 years, and the population and fuel use intensity has really taken off from the 80's to really ramp up. Like a Bell Curve, closing in on 1 degree C increase, where the last 40 years has near enough to doubled the previous 160. The next 40 years? Same trend I guess, but add in the methane that's already leaking in Russian tundra, thats a runaway storm in itself.

But I get it. Trippers points where very well made, and I agree with some of what he proposed, but the theme from most here is quite clear, don't worry about it. Then there is the I do worry about it but I'm not going to do anything about it as its inconvenient. Classic NIMBY

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#2619258 10-Dec-2020 10:58

From the movie Battle of Britain "...We've been playing for time. And it's running out!" sums up many of the attitudes in this thread.

We cannot change the past but we can repair it and we can change the future for our mokopuna if we stop denying and stop playing for time. There is enough data supporting the climate change models to fill one hundred libraries.

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#2619265 10-Dec-2020 11:05

tdgeek:

There will be far less arable land, and people cramming into a smaller liveable location. Fresh water will be difficult. Need more power for cooling. Hos the hydro? All depends how the weather and thus rainfall changed. Could be dire

Whilst I agree that it is likely to be dire, I'm not so sure about the rest of your assertions.

Far less arable land? Maybe. The land near sea level will be flooded (or protected). Land near the equator will get warmer, so more prone to becoming deserts, but also land nearer the poles will become farmable. But that's a generalisation. For example, the Sahel (sub-Saharan Africa) is becoming *greener* as a consequence of GW, so in that region there is far more arable land due to changing rainfall patterns. Incidentally, farming practices in the Sahel are extraordinarily inefficient... huge production increases are possible.

There is no shortage of liveable locations. The limitation is simply transportation of food and other supplies. Every location on Earth is vastly better than the best location on Mars. If we can consider terraforming land on a -65C planet with no breathable atmosphere, we can terraform a bit of Earth desert (e.g. Las Vegas).

I think there will be *more* fresh water. A warmer atmosphere can carry more water, and there will be increased evaporation from the sea at warmer temperatures, so likely more rainfall and less difficulty with fresh water. But also more hurricanes and typhoons.

Likewise hydro. More rainfall, so overall more hydroelectric power available. Of course, less rain may fall in the catchments where hydro is currently present.

In places that are already warm, more power will be used for cooling. But in places that are too cool, less power will be needed for heating. Overall a drift of populations away from too-warm places towards currently-too-cool places will occur.

Rikkitic

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#2619281 10-Dec-2020 11:14

frankv:

Whilst I agree that it is likely to be dire, I'm not so sure about the rest of your assertions.

Far less arable land? Maybe. The land near sea level will be flooded (or protected). Land near the equator will get warmer, so more prone to becoming deserts, but also land nearer the poles will become farmable. But that's a generalisation. For example, the Sahel (sub-Saharan Africa) is becoming *greener* as a consequence of GW, so in that region there is far more arable land due to changing rainfall patterns. Incidentally, farming practices in the Sahel are extraordinarily inefficient... huge production increases are possible.

There is no shortage of liveable locations. The limitation is simply transportation of food and other supplies. Every location on Earth is vastly better than the best location on Mars. If we can consider terraforming land on a -65C planet with no breathable atmosphere, we can terraform a bit of Earth desert (e.g. Las Vegas).

I think there will be *more* fresh water. A warmer atmosphere can carry more water, and there will be increased evaporation from the sea at warmer temperatures, so likely more rainfall and less difficulty with fresh water. But also more hurricanes and typhoons.

Likewise hydro. More rainfall, so overall more hydroelectric power available. Of course, less rain may fall in the catchments where hydro is currently present.

In places that are already warm, more power will be used for cooling. But in places that are too cool, less power will be needed for heating. Overall a drift of populations away from too-warm places towards currently-too-cool places will occur.

I agree with your points but what about the enormous economic and migratory disruptions that will result from all this? Collapse of the financial system alone could result in mass starvation and bloodshed in the streets.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

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#2619282 10-Dec-2020 11:14

tripper1000:

fertiliser produced from oil.

Fertiliser is not produced from oil. Typically it is made from methane (natural gas) and nitrogen (from the air).

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