Climate change believers are you really ready to do what is nessessary? (Earth)

[Halcyon]

Originally Posted by yossarian22

It is not going to cause bigger storms. It is not going to cause drought. It causes the rainforests to grow faster. The increase in sea levels is easily dealt with. So some suffer. Most of us will not. That is all we can ever strive for.

Where are you getting this from?

[lilithu]

Originally Posted by Halcyon

Where are you getting this from?

Sily Halcyon, haven't you heard this argument before? Plants love CO2. The rainforest is full of plants. Therefore we should pollute the air as much as possible with carbon gases so that the trees will grow faster.

[OutOfTime]

what if we lived in prehistoric earth with our technology. no matter how many cars we had, it'd still have volcanoes bursting all over the place and deserts forming and whatnot...

ppl can be fooled into believing everyone's a witch, communist, or terrorist, they can be fooled into anything.

[yossarian22]

Originally Posted by Jaiket

Fair enough. I disagree. Have you read Heat by George Monbiot?

No. I'll pick it up next time I head to a library.

Originally Posted by Halcyon

Where are you getting this from?

Storm intensity will be unaffected
AMS Online Journals - Hurricanes and Global Warming: Results from Downscaling IPCC AR4 Simulations
From the same guy who first presented idea. He publicly reversed his ideas maybe 4 weeks ago. Anyhow, there was more evidence previously that denied the link between storm intensity/frequency and increasing global temperature.
Rainforest growth
Climate change may help rainforests - Times Online
That article does a decent job of discussing what the actual article contains. The abstract is linked there as well
Drought
Abrupt changes in rainfall during the twentieth century
There has been a decrease in the number of long term droughts.
As for sea level estimates, just look at the last IPCC estimates. No trouble at all.

[yossarian22]

Originally Posted by lilithu

Sily Halcyon, haven't you heard this argument before? Plants love CO2. The rainforest is full of plants. Therefore we should pollute the air as much as possible with carbon gases so that the trees will grow faster.

Have the decency to make a point.

[lilithu]

Originally Posted by yossarian22

Have the decency to make a point.

My point is that your argument is ridiculous! Even if the increased CO2 levels did promote rainforest growth, there is no way that these trees could grow fast enough to offset the increase in carbon gas concentrations. Do you understand the concept of balance?? Just because your body performs best on carbs, does that mean you should eat three bowls of pasta every day??!

There is only so much carbon gas (such as CO2) that can be in the air without raising the average global temperature, causing drastic weather changes. The estimate is that 350 ppm is the ceiling for safety and we've already passed that sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. The rest of the carbon has to be sequestered, either in the ground as fossil fuels, or in the existing biomass, or in the ocean. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have been taking the carbon that's sequestered in the ground as fossil fuels, having taken millions of years to get there, and burning it, putting carbon into the air. At the same time, we've been cutting down our rainforests and burning that, in order to clear land for grazing cows. That means the carbon that was in those trees are now also up in the air. We've gone from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution to 385 ppm today, and rising.

Some people have suggested planting trees as a way to combat rising carbon levels. The problem is that young trees, sapplings, don't sequester carbon at near the same levels as older trees. It isn't just the CO2 that the trees consume for respiration, the more important thing is how much carbon they sequester. That means it has to be stored in their mass and stay there. New growth does precious little to reduce carbon levels in the air. And since the whole point is to reduce carbon gas concentrations, why not pollute less carbon gases in the first place, rather than arguing rather pathetically that the trees will clean it up for us.

[NoahideHiker]

Originally Posted by OutOfTime

what if we lived in prehistoric earth with our technology. no matter how many cars we had, it'd still have volcanoes bursting all over the place and deserts forming and whatnot...

ppl can be fooled into believing everyone's a witch, communist, or terrorist, they can be fooled into anything.

Come on man don't you know you're going against the consensus? The consensus is ALWAYS right! At one point or another the consensus thought the world was flat, slavery was OK, women didn't deserve the same rights as men and David Hasselhoff was the best actor alive. OK, the last one was just me but I ain't right in the head.

Stop rebelling and fall in line with the rest consensus dude...

[lilithu]

Originally Posted by NoahideHiker

At one point or another the consensus thought the world was flat, slavery was OK, women didn't deserve the same rights as men.

Yeah. People thought the world was flat and ridiculed people who said otherwise. People thought that global climate change was not happening and ridiculed people who said otherwise. The more things change, the more they stay the same.