Re: What's the Worst That Could Happen? (Climate)

[FlamerKidd]

blah blah blah thecnic shit

[coogiez]

but if the mean temperature around the globe rises by two degrees, that's like the human body's temperature rising by two degrees, you're really ill!

[coogiez]

also, didn't that wanderingmind guy say that all his argument in the end specify that it's not even the ammount of damage this environmental distabalisation, it's about the fact that we can do something about it?

that makes this rebuttle pointless.

[SteveWrathall]

The alarmists claim that even if we stopped emitting GHG now, the earth's temperature would still rise. But the shut-down of the global economy would immediately cause billions to starve. Sounds like a high price to pay for nothing.

[SteveWrathall]

No the Earth is not a product of natural selection, unlike your body. The Gaia religion is new-age mumbo-jumbo with zero predictive value. There are ecosystems with average teperatures of -20 and others +30 deg C. And all tolerate large temperature swings.

[Pestv]

youve got to be kidding me! we know kyoto will do nothin to help! thats why we need to take MORE action! you undermined your own argument as well!

'developed' countries have already mostly destroyed environments through deforestation/pollution (look how much of the UK used to be covered in forest!)

and it is what countries ARE doin to grow economies, freetrade means NO protrection for trees!

yr arguments make no sense!

dont post if you dont know the facts, our future 'could' be at risk! :-)

[SteveWrathall]

Overall, developed countries have increased their forest cover in the 20th century. NZ has been increasing its plantation forests, while preserving its natural forests ever since the 1950s. The last few years have actually seen an increase in deforestation- Why? Kyoto.

Forest owners rushing to convert to pastureland, so that they have the option of converting this "existing use" to forest in future and claim the carbon credits. Another brilliant bureucratic stuff up.

[Savehumanrights]

More carbon is better for trees. They breath the stuff. Look at scandanavia cananda look at all the trees. Look at the Australian desert. Once it was dust now with dams we can grow things. Do a search on world reforestation and you will see that there is more trees mainly in develped countries then say 50 years ago. The vegos are clearing the amazon (non westen) to grow soybeens cause they won't eat meat.

[OgallalaKnowhow]

The IPCC uses multiple scenarios with no 'one', universally agreed upon prediction. So saying that the IPCC 'actually predicts this' is a moot point.

Also I take issue with you point that developed countries have been able to replant forests because of the superiority of our system, ect.

We buy a lot of wood from 'poor' counties, so saying that forests are logged due to 'corruption' outright ignores economic relationships between developed and poorer states.

[SteveWrathall]

You're right. But their projections cluster around temperature/sea rises that are not catastrophic.

[minilemur]

SteveWrathall - excellent response to the rubbishy alarmism of so-called "Wonderingmind42".

[1337ASM]

IPPC has been proven to be under estimate GCC!!!

[SteveWrathall]

Global temperatures are undershooting even the "low" warming predictions. See my vid "Mother Earth: Global Warming Denier"

[776281]

Tell you what. You would have to give me the house for me to live on the coast. My investment strategy is canned food and guns.

Chances are it is already to late. We have stuffed the plannet now the Earth is going to get its revenge

[SteveWrathall]

"Stuffed" ow precisely? That's the problem with you doomcasters: it's never quite clear how this armaggeddon is supposed to arise. We just get a list of environmental problems, all individually managable, and many solved years ago e.g. air pollution in western nations.

[776281]

The Arctic melt was the greatest ever this year, the permafrost is starting to melt through Canada and Russia. The melting permafrost is releasing more than expected methane and CO2. The Southern Ocean is absorbing less CO2. 1.8 cubic kilometers of water moved 300K under the ice of the East Antarctic Ice sheet in 1996/97(Google Lake Vostock). You do have one point - it may be time for nuclear power

[SteveWrathall]

Methane has mysteriously stopped rising. See my latest vid.

[spiderveloce]

And please stop with the free-market preaching. Have you any idea how much subsidizing our energy sector already receives, in various forms? That's to say nothing of negative externalities.

[SteveWrathall]

"Free Market??" In NZ over half the price of petrol is tax. In Europe even worse. In a true free market it would be much cheaper.

[TempestStormwind]

And also in a true free market there woudln't be police to stop people from stealing it from you, since the taxes that you ripped away went to funding defense. Likewise for roads to drive on.

No matter what you may think you think of government, you benefit from its existence. Governments give us the chance to do things that no individual can.

This is covered in later How It All Ends videos: Get What You Want, I Hope I'm Wrong, and No Holds Barred, all on Wonderingmind42's account.

[SteveWrathall]

I'm not arguing for no tax. Simply pointing to the falsity of you claim that fossil fuels are highly subsidised by govt, when the opposite is true.

[TempestStormwind]

The subsidies are in production.

Here's a simple example since it's been a hot topic in Canadian news recently: Alberta (until recently) allowed energy firms to come on in and build whatever they wanted in their oil sand. They only had to pay a trivial royalty rate until it was paid off, and then the rate rose to something a bit higher.

That's a government subsidy -- of the producer, in the form of decreased royalty rates, to encourage development. No such subsidy exists for nuclear et al.

[SteveWrathall]

And what other industry is competing to develop anything in these empty expanses? Peppercorn royalties make perfect sense in such situations.

[TempestStormwind]

The example was not looking at WHERE the development was taking place, but WHAT SORT of development was being used.

You won't find a government providing subsidies to develop nuclear power or dispose of its waste, even if it's in an "empty expanse". The fact that it's empty isn't what's encouraging the subsidy; the fact that it's oil is.

In order for alternatives like nuclear to be competitive, subsidies like this must be provided to the alternatives.

[spiderveloce]

Thanks for that lesson on logical fallacies. The reason Kyoto would have that affect is that the emissions in the air already are what will affect that almost 2 C change. If we continue to emit, we will commit to even more. Also, Kyoto is a multistep process.

[SteveWrathall]

Yes. Kyoto is "only the start". The 4c/L on petrol and ~$50/year that the govt has just increased electricity is just a foretaste of the huge forced reductions of living required if you believe the MMGW religion. All this while China is building a coal power station every week. Pointless.

[ThirtyThreeArsenic]

Besides, wonderingmind42 recommendation to us about what to do about GW is to push for legislation that would help reduce its effects, not to just push for the Kyoto protocol to be implemented in all countries. If you think economic legislation that aids third world countries will solve problems X, Y, and Z, then by all means do what you can to have that legislation push.

[ThirtyThreeArsenic]

If you had watched "How it All Ends: The Manpollo Project" you'd understand wonderingmind42 admitted he cannot quantify all possible results on his chart. The chart serves only as a guide to the possible worst/best case scenario outcomes as predicted by several leading scientific organizations (AAAS and NAS for example.) The fact that a judge has declared global warming to be nonexistent holds very little weight against the information collected and presented by these organizations.

[TempestStormwind]

Finally, you speak of *growth* as the cure.

...Are you even listening to yourself, or did you fail arithmetic as a child?

In any situation with finite resources, growth itself is not sustainable and in fact causes far more problems than it solves. Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of cancer.

Look up Dr. Albert Bartlett's "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" talk for an example of how ludicrous this is.

[SteveWrathall]

You're making the same logical flaw Malthus did 200 years ago. Even though some "resources" are finite, human ingenuity isn't. Our descendants will thank us for continuing to build roads, bridges, dams etc. On the other hand, if their living standard is no higher than ours, they will curse us.

[TempestStormwind]

I apologize for my tone, but not for my message.

Setting aside food for a moment, consider population. World population is increasing with a fixed rate per year, more or less. There's only a finite amount of land on the planet.

Either our ingenuity will figure something out, or we'll run out of land for there to be people in. Use that ingenuity, and you'll see the solution is to *stop growing*.

[SteveWrathall]

Actually even the world's numerical population increase is now slowing, and has done since Y2K. The reason: Educate women, and they have less than 2 kids.

[TempestStormwind]

Cite your sources; I can't find this information anywhere.

Also, this isn't always true. I know at least two well-educated women who are dedicated to having as many kids as possible -- "Go forth and multiply" and all. (This isn't representative of the world population *at all*, but it's enough to demonstrate that your statement isn't absolute.)

[SteveWrathall]

From "The Australian" 20 Nov 07:

"Immediate past president of the Royal Society, Professor Lord Robert May said....it was encouraging that in the past year global fertility rates fell below replacement levels for the first time in recorded history, with the average female now having slightly less than one female child."

This is an epochal event. So the media will ignore. Average fertility is what's important, though individual choices might vary.

[TempestStormwind]

Second, if you'd rather look at "economic harm", please find a credible source that predicts such harm.

The biggest name that I was able to find that yelled about economic harm was the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank who argued against Kyoto, because implementing it would mean that gas prices would go up to $1.98/gallon in the US.

[SteveWrathall]

Here in NZ the govt has just put another 4c/L on petrol explicitly to live up to our Kyoto committments. But that's nothing compared with electricity. In order to make renewables like wind competitive with coal powered stations would put an exta $400 on an average household's electricity bill. If that's not enough "economoc harm" well, that's just the start.

[TempestStormwind]

That's only because everyone's infrastructure is set up for petroleum, since it's so completely ingrained in our society. It's cheap, and alternative energies will never be competitive... without government intervention and further development. The former is considered "evil" by right-wing reactionaries, and the latter isn't getting funded because those same reactionaries are betting everything on oil.

[SteveWrathall]

Cheap?? here in NZ, milk and fruit juice are cheaper per volume.

[TempestStormwind]

Ah, but are milk and fruit juice fuel sources?

What you're pulling up is a false comparison -- red herring fallacy.

[TempestStormwind]

That's only because petrol is cheap and your infrastructure is already built to use it, therefore it is *obviously* the more economically competitive option. In order to get alternatives to work, they need government policy on their side -- but right-wing reactionaries equate any action by the government as "evil" even as they benefit from it.

For the record, I don't support wind except as a small boost, since it's unreliable. The only technology we have that can do the job now... is nuclear.

[SteveWrathall]

Actually there I agree with you. See my video on "Nuclear Power for NZ"

[TempestStormwind]

2 degrees warmer doesn't mean that it's just a tiny bit warmer.

Climate's a complex system. Tiny changes can compound, feed back into themselves, and produce far more dire consequences than the initial change.

I'll give you a quick example. Setting aside Greenland vs. Gulf Stream (that one's well-hyped), for instance, we can look at deserts.

[TempestStormwind]

The deserts of the world form where they are because atmospheric currents, driven by global temperature, deposit warm, dry air on those parts of the world. Spin a globe; the deserts are roughly equidistant from the equator.

Raise the temperature two degrees, those currents grow stronger, and deserts migrate a bit further from the equator.

Now look where that intersects. You're seeing it right now, with Australia's 'drought'.

[TempestStormwind]

Next in line is Africa, continental Europe, and the United States -- right in their breadbaskets. Can the rest of the world further from the equator, such as Russia, Canada, and so on, actually support that many hungry people? Especially if one of them's the US, with their bully-like army?

All of this, from just two degrees... and because you couldn't understand a complex system, you're arguing for inaction.

There's a reason it takes a lot of training to become a climate scientist.

[SteveWrathall]

There is no evidence that total world desert are is increasing. Some areas like the African Sahel are actually greening.

[TempestStormwind]

Because the temperature hasn't risen two degrees yet, therefore things that will arise from those two degrees won't show up yet. Which is why we hopefully still have time to stop it.

Incidentally, I love how your complete lack of understanding of complex systems makes you more qualified to talk about climate science than climate scientists.

[SteveWrathall]

Even if the whole world stopped burning fossil fuels now, the IPCC says there would still be increases in temp. That's the whole point: The difference between business as usual and complete Kyoto implementation is huge in cost, but minimal in outcome.

[TempestStormwind]

Last I checked the IPCC statement said that the temperature would rise -- because of our inaction earlier -- but by less than 2 degrees. There'd be changes, but it would be less than drastic.

Given this, is "well, our actions might not be enough" a good enough reason for you to sit on your ass? Or would you rather do everything in your power to make sure we don't screw this world up for us and our descendants?

[SteveWrathall]

Knock even a small amount off yearly growth. Compounded it will have a huge impact on the living standard of our descendants. They will not thank us for relative poverty compared to the countries that ignore Kyoto.

As for screwing the world up, there is absolutely NOTHING in any credible prediction that mankind has not survived, adapted to and thrived in before. Bloated bureucracy-now that's another story.

[TempestStormwind]

So, a gradual change implemented with much planning *will* have a greater detrimental impact on our standard of living than sudden changes we aren't prepared for (because we took no action).

And effects that we have survived in the past, like refugees due to famine, are *completely* survivable now with a population literally thousands of times larger than world population in the past, with less land to move to.

Right. Got it, chief.

[SteveWrathall]

"gradual change implemented with much planning"?? Have you been listening to the alarmists? They demand big cuts NOW! they are quite explicit about this. Kyoto is just the baby steps.

The biggest balls-ups of the last century were done in the name of government "planning".

[TempestStormwind]

Let me put it this way. We can make decisions now, on (more or less) our own terms, or we can make the decisions later, after it's far too late to do anything and with several of the crises raining down. But we will decide; even if we don't act now, the people will demand action when it does happen and we have to deal with the fallout.

If you think what the alarmists are calling for now is bad, imagine what *that* would look like.

Then decide which one has more planning involved.

[SteveWrathall]

All this assumes that these Hollywood blockbuster type "Crises raining Down" actually come true. That is not actually what the IPCC is predicting, even their biased and overblown "consensus" is +2 deg C and 20cm sea level rise. The Al Gore/ Day after Tomorrow scenarios assume a climate system dominated by positive feedback effects. 3.5B years of planetary life support shows the opposite is true.

[TempestStormwind]

I showed earlier how the consequences of just a 2 degree increase in global temperature would lead to famines and refugees. For more information, google up Hadley cells and related atmospheric currents.

Unless you claim to be a better sage of climate science than the climate scientists, I'll stick to their predictions -- which are disturbingly close to what I've claimed here. Hell, governments are likely acting on it now -- Google the phrase "lifeboat britain" for one possible example.

[SteveWrathall]

The famine/regugee sagas are not generated by the climate scientists, but by the activists and politicians who loyally follow H.L.Mecken's advice that: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

[SteveWrathall]

"Lifeboat Britain" was hilarious. A classic e.g. of what "the Great Global Warming Swindle" outlined: how the scarist predictions have to get shriller and shriller to have the same impact.

Please post evidence that Thailand is desertifying. My wife's family would love to know.

[AgnesBojaxhiu2000]

the theory of GW is also in wikipedia ... there they explain about how the hockey stick co2 will cause infrared radiation to soar .. that is the same radiation that is used to heat french fries at mcdonalds ... infrared radiation also known as "heat" or sometimes "heat radiation" ... and it is killing off all the types of bees ... literally burning them out of the sky ... honey bees, bumblebees, yellow jackets .. all types of bees are heading toward extinction like the frog

[SteveWrathall]

There are many theories about bee depletion, however your GW hypothesis has no evidential backup. Most researchers blame it on pesticides.