Re: What is YOUR view?

On 3/31/2024 5:59 AM, David Brooks wrote:

The new MARTIN DURKIN DOCUMENTARY : CLIMATE: THE MOVIE
 https://www.climatethemovie.net/
 It's rather an uphill battle I fear.
 

The NCSE had to take up global warming denial because the ID perps had become the most effective organization for keeping creationism out of the public schools because they were running their bait and switch scam on the rubes that had converted over to ID creationism, so the creationist attempts were effectively stopped because the creationists had never listened to the science side of the issue, but when the creationists scam artists selling you the scam told the rubes not to do it, they tended to listen.  Science denial is science denial, but what is the real issue with global warming?
We are putting out a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Some people worry about methane, but the effect is likely negligible because methane doesn't last very long in the atmosphere.  We likely did accelerate global warming with our increased output of carbon dioxide, but we did it at a time when global temperatures had already been increasing for thousands of years.
We need to better define what the crisis is.
We probably should be nearing the end of the current warming period. For the last million years we have had the 100,000 year ice age cycles. The earth has been cooling for the last 3 million years, but for the last million we went to a cycle of around a hundred thousand years of cold interspersed with 20 to 30 thousand years of warmer climate.  The temperatures of the cycles seem to have become more extreme in the last 500,000 years.  The last warm period got warmer than it is now, and more ice melted and sea levels were 20 meters higher than they are now.  We have not reached that point, yet in this cycle, so things are not yet as bad as they got without human industrial interference.
There was an article put up on TO, maybe a decade ago, that claimed that the current carbon dioxide levels could prevent a recession into another ice age.  We might delay the next ice age.  This really doesn't seem to be that bad.  We got a taste of what things would be like when temperatures fell for the mini ice age that started in the 1300's and didn't end until the start of the industrial revolution that is supposed to be responsible for our current global warming.  Since we are around the end of the warm cycle it may be that things would have just kept getting colder without human intervention.  Europe would have been rendered nearly uninhabitable.  The Greenland colony died out during this cold period.  North America's northern latitudes would have likely failed to be colonized by Europeans.  The industrial revolution would have likely shifted to countries closer to the equator.  We would be crying about very different circumstances if the world had continued to get colder instead of warming back up by 1850.
So, we likely have to figure out what the crisis is.  The earth has seen warmer climates that had more ice melting and sea levels rising to the levels that they claim may occur this time, but they obviously happened before.  So the regions that will be flooded will just be a repeat of what happened last time a hundred thousand years ago.  If we delay the next ice age arctic ecology will suffer more than last time if the warm period is extended.  What we observe today are the remnants of what has survived thousands of years of reduced habitat.  A lot of arctic species had already gone extinct before the industrial revolution.  Arctic ecologies have their heydays during the glacial periods when currently highly populated regions like New York were under a mile of ice.  Things started to get warmer before the glacial maximum 25,000 years ago.  It may be that the climate should be getting colder at this time, but is that something that we want to happen?  Do we want to go back to a time when New York city was under a mile of ice and polar bears had sea ice year round to hunt all the seals that were lying around?  The Islands worried about being flooded out would instead see their coral reefs dry out and more of the coral atolls be exposed.  They would have issues with things like getting the reefs reestablished in what was deeper water, and they would have to try to reduce erosion so that there would be something above sea level during the next warm period.
So, the crisis has to be defined, and what we should do about it, probably, has to be figured out.
Ron Okimoto