The Cellar - Climate Change. It's Real.

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- - Climate Change. It's Real. (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=30453)

Oh and this is supposed to raise probability of hurricanes and tropical storms on the west coast of the Americas but lower probability in the Gulf.

At least this writer still has something of a sense of humor...

Natural World Report - 7/30/15 - Ian Lang

Quote:

It’s a common theme when discussing Washington, DC to suggest that the political environment sinks lower every year,
slowly descending to a level where barely-sentient politicians fling poo at one another.
It’s also a popular joke that Washington, DC is build on an unstable swamp.

One of those things is definitely not true, but nonetheless geologists from the University of Vermont have found
that the land under the Chesapeake Bay – including Washington, DC – is literally sinking.
…
The sinking has to do with something called a forebulge, and its continued collapse.
Tens of thousands of years ago, during the last ice age,
a humongous ice sheet covering northern North America weighed so much
that it pushed the land around it away. In turn, that cause the land even further south to bulge upward.
Once the ice sheet began melting 20,000 years ago, the forebulge has slowly shrunk.
…
People didn’t melt the prehistoric ice sheet, and there’s precious little we could do to stop the land from leveling out.
Where climate change does come in, however, is the fact that the waters
of the Chesapeake Bay are rising at twice the global average rate and faster than elsewhere on the East Coast.
...
“It’s ironic that the nation’s capital—the place least responsive to the dangers of climate change
is sitting in one of the worst spots it could be in terms of this land subsidence,” said Paul Bierman,
a UVM geologist and the senior author on the new paper.
“Will the Congress just sit there with their feet getting ever wetter?

What’s next, forebulge denia l?”

I say we take all the mountaintops from mountaintop mines and dump them where the ice sheet used to be.

The pollution from that kind of effort would defeat the purpose.
Nationalize the refrigeration companies and recreate the ice sheet.

But DC going glub glub? You say that like it's a bad thing.
Smart people like glatt and Happy Monkey would split long before their feet got wet.

I'm at the high point of DC; my property values would probably go up.

Happy Monkey Island! I see a resort, maybe be even a major motion picture! Don't sign anything involving Kevin Costner. http://cellar.org/2012/nono.gif

In that story the author says that it is a falsehood to claim that the climate has always changed.

note he starts off saying that climate has always been changing, another line of denier baloney

It isn't denying anthropomorphic climate change to admit that earths climate has changed and will change. Is it?

If more people believe that climate changes without mankind, they will be more inclined to believe AGW is not a problem. So "climate changes without mankind" is a Team Purple fact. Phil Plait is actually team captain of Team Orange. So it's very important for him to refute that.

And he's debating a politician, not a scientist, so this is a political debate and actual scientific rigor in the debate would be inappropriate.

But there's no question about historical change. Up to about 12000 years ago, the Griff homestead was entirely covered in glacier and sea levels were much lower than they are now:

http://cellar.org/2015/nysglaciers.jpg

The last retreat of glaciers from Canada was 5000 years ago; on a geologic scale, the [surface of the] earth has been warming; this is a natural cycle. Earlier glaciers went even further south.

The matter at hand is that some recently measured increases are at a faster rate than the natural rate, and being faster, may cause additional problems for children and other living things.

The problem for everyone is how nuanced an argument all this becomes. So everyone sticks to the shorthand, which is unscientific on both sides.

Quote:

...this is a natural cycle....

What does "natural cycle" really mean ?
It's "natural" so therefore...
= acceptable ?
= unimportant ?
= uncontrollable ?
= not to be feared ?
= not of concern ?
= not fixable by society ?

Isn't "natural cycle" just a slippery way of staying climate warming
is not significant enough to waste time, resources, our traditional ways, profits, etc.

Being in my 80's, I know, intellectually, that climate warming will not actually affect me much, if at all.
... maybe not it will not even affect my adult children or youngest grandchildren.

But I am of the belief that climate warming is something that society should make an effort to alleviate.
Even if it is not completely attributable to the effects of modern man,
it very likely will be a serious problem for all of our descendents,
and something effective can be done sooner than later.

After all, what else have we got to do today that's really important ?

Then too, I may be of the "Ant Clan", not the "Grasshopper".

,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griff (Post 935420)

In that story the author says that it is a falsehood to claim that the climate has always changed.

Did you see the asterisk next to "baloney"?

LL this is how the more nuanced scientific discussion is not productive to the political discussion.

Mankind has accelerated the natural trend, and it is an important matter to understand how much and why, and all this should be studied and addressed.