Clay Bennett for October 14, 2018

It would scare me in the daylight.

It’s not scary enough. Too many people can still sleep.

Those kids have every right to be terrified. They could be the last generation of humans on this planet.

Aw now, they should be studying to define and obtain their coals in life. Isn’t that report part of Dicken’s Bleak (Future) House? Hey! Life’s a gas (CO2).

Republicans don’t care, they want you to use more coal.

They get bribes from Koch to promote coal.

Save the world, vote out a Republican.

Whats even scarier is that there are still people talkiny about keeping rump! Huh!

Some people procrastinate until the issue is a crisis, true conservatives are cautious and take preventative action whether it’s it budget or climate. Don’t you wish there was a true conservative party that was in charge now instead of radical extremists?

Could any of you “man caused change” believers tell me what the ideal temperature for the planet is?

?..and the US should just go on polluting? until they stop? “You jump off the cliff first!” ’No, YOU!

Anti-man either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to admit that India and China ARE taking actions to limit CO2 emissions. The three countries currently are responsible for HALF of the emissions. However, the US has been the front-runner for a very long time and therefore should be the leader in combating climate change. In addition to direct emissions from the US, look at how much of China;’s emissions are for products destined for the US (plus add in the transportation to US).

The costs of inaction are much greater than taking action.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24092018/climate-change-economic-damage-america-social-cost-carbon-china-india-russia

Trump placed tariffs on solar panels from China with a 5-year timeline. Solar panels require extremely “clean” manufacturing conditions, which is expensive; limiting the plan to 5 years doesn’t contribute to US manufacturing of solar panels but does inhibit US construction using panels. This tariff has cost the US thousands of jobs.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-solar-insight/billions-in-u-s-solar-projects-shelved-after-trump-panel-tariff-idUSKCN1J30CT

All the finger pointing is useless until we.. you.. stop buying stuff.. having too many children. We are all victims of continuous growth.. at one time the success of our species.. but everything has a limit and perhaps we have reached ours.

In the big picture it will work itself out.. and in 2000 years there will still be humans living in caves.. as we started out.

What I find terrifying is the ignorance of many of the right wing posters here. Even at this critical point they consider the impending environmental disaster just a political debate issue and would attack or resist any measure to protect the environment just to spite the liberals. The very existence of the human species is at stake, but they couldn’t care less.

If those kid’s parents (18-29 year olds) would get off their asses and vote the republicans out of office, we could start to repair the mess republicanism has given us.

@Iron Pounder: the problem isn’t that we are losing an “ideal” climate; there is no such thing. The problem is that it is changing too quickly for us to manage, and it has secondary effects. For example, if warming leads the Midwest to become a Dust Bowl and Canada becomes a better climate to grow wheat, we have to import food, which we have never had to do before. We are already seeing shifts in various parts of the world – some islands are disappearing beneath the waves, increased aridity in some areas have caused famine.

We have foodstuffs and animals bred for certain climates. When those climates change, they can’t just adapt along with them.

This isn’t even new, by the way. It is thought that the Black Plague wiping out one-third to two-thirds of Europe led to a climactic change because farmland went back to forest!

And this doesn’t include the increasing weather intensity due to more energy in the atmosphere – imagine most hurricanes being a “once-in-a-century” superstorm, and most snowstorms being major blizzards.

And of course one fear is “runaway warming,” which could lead to even worse effects. If you’re curious, check out our twin planet, Venus, which has a mostly CO2 atmosphere: https://www.universetoday.com/36296/climate-of-venus/

National Geographic has a nice information hub on anthropogenic climate change: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/04/seven-things-to-know-about-climate-change/

@antiquetracman – Sadly, both your facts and your logic fail. China has been investing massively in solar power and other renewable energy technology (they got from us), they build more electric cars than anyone, and the effects are already being seen. They were the fastest-growing CO2 polluter; now they are declining. See this article in Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-china-pollution/

Also, saying “well, they don’t do anything, so it’s pointless for us to do anything” is simply wrong. Every country that gets better gives us time to figure out what else to do, and perhaps stave off greater disaster. For example, CO2 capture technology is improving – it’s nowhere near enough to make a difference yet, but if we use that as well as reducing CO2 emissions, we have a real shot at turning things around, IF we have time to develop it. If we slow down CO2 emissions, we have time to switch to more renewable resources and slow them down further.

Besides: what downside is there to reducing our dependence on oil? Moving to renewable resources would cripple hostile Islamic nations, reduce pollution generally, and enable us to use the same amount of electricity at a far lower cost.

I’d say the correct conditions would best be based on those that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution. This has all accumulated in the last 200 years. To ignore the impact of man made climate change in light of that is stupefying.

The “ideal” temperature is whatever allows us to sustain ourselves, a technical civilization, and the environment we developed civilization in. That means we don’t want ice ages or hot periods that will submerge a large portion of our present civilization under rising seas, or turn our wheat or rice producing regions into semi-arid deserts. And as deserts spread, and cities drown, so will migration away from them spread and as will social chaos.

The time to be producing more CO2 in the atmosphere is when the cooling for the next ice age starts. That will be no sooner than 2000 years, and likely longer.

(I’ll point out that the climate models that don’t put in man=made CO2 forcing (fossil fuel burning) show a very slight cooling effect over the last 40-50 years as opposed to the very real warming measured. Given natural variations, that cooling is not yet statistically significant, but indicates the importance of including human sources of greenhouse gases.)

That future need for CO2 is one of the reasons for developing the ability to sequester CO2 from the current atmosphere. It’s not cheap now, but when the fossil fuels have been used up it may seem cheap.

There is an old saying, which people ignore. “A stitch in time saves nine.” Everyone has experienced that in some form. Well it works for the environment and the future success of humanity as well as a sock.

Too bad we can’t ask a Dinosaur – he would give us an earful about climate change.

On Facebook the other day. “Hurricanes should be named after politicians who deny climate change.”

Unintended irony, I’m sure: they’re burning wood, a 2-fer.

Please bear with me for a bit. OK, so everyone hates coal because burning it releases carbon dioxide that “causes climate change.” According to the US Energy Dept, as of 2017 there were 476 billion tons of coal still in the ground in the US. So, where did all that coal come from? According to scientists, it is the remains of plant life that lived on the earth millions of years ago. Now how did those plants store up all that carbon? Well there’s this thing called photo-synthesis that the plants use to take in carbon dioxide and release the oxygen. If the plants could put down 476 billion tons, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. So, if the plants were thriving back then and the fossil records shows there was animal life as well, how is more carbon dioxide in the air a bad thing now?

Iron pounder, the processes of CO2 sequestration by nature are SLOW! And the processes which convert dead plant matter to coad are SLOW. If you were to examine how CO2 was released by the dead leaves on your lawn, it would be slow. Slower still for plant matter that falls to the bottom of lakes and bogs, where there is no oxygen for the reduction of the matter. On geologic time scales the matter is covered over with sand and silt, to great depths, and under pressure and heat, becomes oil & gas.

CO2 was indeed much higher levels HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO! HOW MANY OF THE ANIMALS FROM THAT PERIOD SURVIVE TODAY! The ones that do survive had millions of years to adapt.

WE HAVE CHANGED THE ATMOSPHERE SIGNIFICANTLY IN THE LAST 50 YEARS. 50 YEARS! THE SAME AMOUNT OF CO2 ADDED OR SUBTRACTED FROM THE ATMOSPHERE DURING GLACIAL CYCLES TOOK THOUSANDS OF YEARS (7000 MINIMUM)! CRIPES, WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CONVINCE YOU PEOPLE THAT 50 YEARS IS TOO FAST FOR NATURE TO ADAPT.

Big deal! you say? Wait until you are seeing the economic cost of coastal (and regions near the coast) flooding. We are no longer animals that can simply react to climate change by moving somewhere else. Local climate changes doomed civilizations like Mohenjo-Daro. But the human population was sparse on the ground and people could more easily move elsewhere. Not so much now.

And when the wheat fields dry out? As the cornbelt dries, we’ll see wheat in Iowa. But anybody thinking that warming will increase Canadian harvests is ignoring the fact that the soil in northern Canada is a lot more boggy and even as it dries, not suitable for many grains.

And too much CO2 does not make better grains. Research is showing that in rice and grains that there is LESS nuitritional value per plant — which means you need to grow more plants (and need more water) to get the same nutrition.

Just as scary as all the other made-up stories!

I love a good science fiction horror story.