I agree. But I think that we shouldn't give up hope.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Do you think the weather/climate change has only to do with humans or is it also occuring naturally?
- Thread starter We Never Know
- Start date
I agree. But I think that we shouldn't give up hope.
We Never Know
No Slack
Its faster than normal but slower than if 3 huge dino killer meteors hit. There is really nothing to compare it to being we can't compare it to the last time we did it because this is the first time we've done it.
Anything slower than three huge meteorites as a little slow?
Yes there is!
There are the other multiple times that the climate changed.
Tom
It's more like the other way round, as Sun rise pointed out.
There are plenty of natural hot-cold cycles. There's a 24 hour cycle and a 1 year cycle we're all familiar with. There are Milankovitch cycles Milankovitch cycles - Wikipedia and solar cycles Solar cycle - Wikipedia , continental drift &al. Except for some of the solar cycles these are predictable and measurable. Their effects are predictable. None of these are currently at a stage that would cause the warming we're experiencing today, in fact, without the sudden increase in greenhouse gasses we'd be in a cooling stage.
Then there are unpredictable causes: volcanism, meteorites, &c, but they, too, are obvious and measurable.
And that leaves....
It matters a lot. Like slowly heating up a log, at some point it catches fire and begins producing its own heat -- and a lot of it. This is the tipping point we've heard about -- but even at our present rate of warming large areas are predicted to become uninhabitable.
Tipping point driver: A lot of sunlight used to be reflected back into space by arctic ice and snow, but it's melting fast. Northern seas are warming and permafrost is melting. Huge amounts of CO2 and CH4 are percolating out of arctic lakes and tundra. Sometimes even building up and causing massive explosions.
In the ocean are huge beds of Methane hydrate, a sort of "frozen" methane (natural gas). Raising the ocean temperature could trigger a rapid melt, doubling the atmospheric methane levels almost overnight. Methane's a much 'stronger' greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
More CH4 and CO2 = more heating = more ice melt = more CH4/CO2 = more heating -- see?
And how about food? How are China's and India's billions going to feed themselves once the Himalayan glaciers melt and the great rivers that sustain their agriculture have no more meltwater to sustain them?
Remember the drought that triggered the Arab Spring and the subsequent chaos in the Middle East; and the waves of refugees currently causing political upheavals in Europe? Multiply that effect a hundred times.
What about the northern forests? Many of them are sustained by the phytoplankton in the mid oceans.
Through a long, multi-step string of predation, beginning with the plankton, tonnes of fertilizer swim hundreds of miles upstream each year to die and fertilize entire regions -- through another cascade of predation effects. Without this, many northern forest regions would look very different.
The oceans have been soaking up ~95% of global warming, and plankton are temperature sensitive.
Oh, and by the way. photosynthesizing phytoplankton and the already shrinking tropical forests are responsible for most of the oxygen we breathe.
How about Europe? Look at a map. The British Isles are at Canadian longitudes. The reason they don't have a Canadian climate is the Atlantic Conveyor, a loop of current bringing warm water up from the tropics. It's a thermohaline current, meaning it's driven by surface temperatures and salinity gradients. Massive amounts of fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic from Greenland &al could severely alter its flow, or even shut it down regionally. This could have huge effects in Europe.
No-one's going to want to vacation in St Tropez if it has a climate like Minnesota.
Biodiversity? Biodiversity's important. The complex ecosystem we currently enjoy depends on biodiversity. The plants, animals, fungi and bacteria are all interdependent; all complexly interwoven. Start pulling threads out of this fabric and the whole thing will unravel.
Climate skeptics seem unaware of the many direct and, especially, indirect effects of climate change, many already well underway. All I hear on the news is sea rise and the real estate problems it could cause. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on all day listing negative effects like these.
Amen to that, brother.
Yersinia pestis -- the plague bacterium -- is part of nature, too, but out of control; without natural checks and balances it wiped out a third of Europe.
Remove a species from the environment it's part of and supports, and it can cause tremendous damage. Pythons in Florida's everglades have consumed 95% of the natural wildlife. Rabbits and cane toads in Australia, Feral pigs, grey squirrels, cats, rats, carp, lion fish -- all natural. All catastrophic in the wrong place.
Humans have removed themselves from the checks and balances of nature. We're now multiplying out of control and feeding off the ecosystem we were once a part of, millennia ago.
How are we different, in effect, from an infectious bacteria or virus?
We're a planetary infection.
But it would change at a rate the ecosystem could deal with, as it has pretty much forever -- excepting a handful of catastrophic, mass extinction events it took tens of millions of years to recover from.
We appear to be in one of these sudden, catastrophic events.
Agreed -- and it's initiating, direct cause is us.
Every species micro and macro biological that finds itself an ecological bounty takes advantage of such great extent that it's to its own detriment. Even to the point that it messes up its own ecology. That is the most natural thing there is.
That doesn't mean it's good but natural has never meant good.
There have been only five changes comparable to the current one, maybe six if you include Snowball Earth. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/mass-extinction/
We Never Know
No Slack
Good point.
We're a natural planetary infection.
Yes we are like an infection to earth. We are like a huge meteor that destroy's all around it and then some.
We Never Know
No Slack
And we are the reason those non-native envasive species are where they are.
We can destroy habitats, species, and even ourselves but we won't destroy life or earth. The question is how much are we willing to destroy before life is more important than profit.
We Never Know
No Slack
But it would change at a rate the ecosystem could deal with, as it has pretty much forever -- excepting a handful of catastrophic, mass extinction events it took tens of millions of years to recover from.
We appear to be in one of these sudden, catastrophic events.
Agreed -- and it's initiating, direct cause is us.
We humans are the catastrophic event.
We Never Know
No Slack
We humans are a catastrophic event that has been unseen on earth before. We are getting to almost asteroid stage with our destruction.
It would be nice to think we had enough free will to choose differently.
But that's obviously not true.
Tom
True but not relevant. What's relevant is the impact of the speed on the Earth. Of course a dino killer meteor strike would be immediately catastrophic and cause the destruction of civilization as well as wiping out most species on earth.
But so what. It's meaningless to the issue of how fast humanity is causing climate change and the impact on the environment.
A meteor is a single insult. Humans are an actual growth; an infection.
We won't destroy all life, but we may radically simplify the ecosystem and destroy everything bigger than a squirrel.
"Event?" Kind of a long-term, ongoing, growing event.
Humans haven't removed themselves from checks and balances, though perhaps some of them like to believe so. Humans still have vital needs that are inexorably tied to their environment and limited in quantity and/or availability. Nay, these "checks and balances" as you put them are not only very much present, but presently active all over the world. Overpopulation amplifies and accelerates those impacts, and we are already seeing the impacts of that right now. It seems to me many humans don't understand overpopulation is already here and the impacts are right now because ecology tends to be poorly covered in the education system. All the major environmental issues we are facing today are symptoms of human overpopulation (compounded by inappropriate technology and consumption rates) and environmental limits coming into play. While it may seem we're "multiplying out of control" I assure you there are controls - the population will crash.
Eh, I don't like making that comparison because it is less accurate than making one to invasive species. ADigitalArtist already pointed out how all biological organisms utilize environment to the fullest extent it can to multiply itself. If you want to point out an area where humans are allegedly different, humans tell themselves that they can exercise self-restraint and are creatures of reason.
...
Which is frankly just LOL-worthy when we look at the evidence.