Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

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Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Mugworm_Griblick »

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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Quzar »

I dunno, I tend to think global warming is mostly overblown as a sign of human arrogance. We're such a large part of this planet that we've been able to spoil it in just a few hundred years...
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Ex-Cyber »

Quzar wrote:I dunno, I tend to think global warming is mostly overblown as a sign of human arrogance.
I tend to think global warming is more suitably studied with climatological analysis than with psychological analysis.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Jeeba Jabba »

Thank god. It's comforting to know that in our lifetime people won't have to travel so far to take tropical vacations.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Specially Cork »

People need to realise, if we cut down on carbon emissions, the human race will be eternal. There is absolutely no way that something outside of human control could come along and kill us all.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Lartrak »

BoneyCork wrote:People need to realise, if we cut down on carbon emissions, the human race will be eternal. There is absolutely no way that something outside of human control could come along and kill us all.
You're right. We should do everything in our power to ensure the early death of the human race.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Chilly Willy »

Being an intelligent race is just that: a race... to see if you can develop fast enough to get off the planet before a) it's ruined by development, b) erased back to bacteria by a huge fucking asteroid, or c) completely sterilized by a nearby gamma burst. Planets are great places for life to start, not great places for life to continue over the eons. Look at how many great mass extincts there have been in the Earth's history as it is. When is the next one? Better hope your descendants have got space travel down by that time. :grin:
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Specially Cork »

Lartrak wrote:
BoneyCork wrote:People need to realise, if we cut down on carbon emissions, the human race will be eternal. There is absolutely no way that something outside of human control could come along and kill us all.
You're right. We should do everything in our power to ensure the early death of the human race.
No, we should just enjoy our lives, and whatever happens, happens.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by U-said-it »

The current human population is already not sustainable. Can you imagine what it'll be like in the next 50 years?

I can see a "Fallout" like future being realistic...
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Christuserloeser »

How is the current population not sustainable ?
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by U-said-it »

Well..., the current carbon emissions issue is directly related to how many people there are, and this is a consideration in getting them down to manageable levels.

This recent article below kind of sums how I feel about this particular angle.
The scientists said dealing with the burgeoning human population of the planet was vital if real progress was to be made on the other enormous problems facing the world.

"It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about" Professor Guillebaud said. "Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation."

Full Article
War, starvation, pandemic diseases... We do indeed have all of these things happening.

Even if we currently did have the knowledge to manage all the required resources like medicine, agriculture, etc., we still haven't conquered the biggest step required to sustain the current worldwide population.

That requirement would be the world's diversity of people getting along, and working with each other to better our chances as a whole.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by pavelbure »

U-said-it wrote: War, starvation, pandemic diseases... We do indeed have all of these things happening.

name a period in history when those 3 things were not around.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by U-said-it »

name a period in history when those 3 things were not around.
Sorry, I should have said this:

War, starvation, pandemic diseases... We do indeed have all of these things happening now due to over-population.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Lartrak »

No, we should just enjoy our lives, and whatever happens, happens.
You'd get along real well with the baby boomers over here.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by U-said-it »

BoneyCork should know better than anyone what overpopulation, combined with ancient coal burning power plants, can do to carbon emissions.

There are roughly a few distinct camps on this subject:
1) Those who deny Global Warming is taking place.
2) Those who actually look at the evidence, and want to do something about it.
3) Those who believe it's happening, but just don't give a crap.

I'm not quite sure what I think about it, for it seems a tad out of my control. Other than watching my own carbon footprint, what am I supposed to do about it?
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Eviltaco64X »

I believe the climate is changing, but I'm not sure if we'll all be dead in 20 years. :P

In fact, the past three or so years have been much colder than usual in my area.

Usually it's around this time of year when the temperature permanently changes (from around early fall 70 degree weather to chilly 45 degree weather), but we've been seeing 35F highs with snow slightly to the north and west of us.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Specially Cork »

U-said-it wrote:BoneyCork should know better than anyone what overpopulation, combined with ancient coal burning power plants, can do to carbon emissions.
I live a certain lifestyle that I enjoy. I'm not prepared to change it, and I'm not prepared to feel guilty about living it. I apologise if that seems blunt and selfish, but...it is. There are millions of people like me, and youre not going to change our attitudes because we're idiots. Sorry.
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Lartrak »

BoneyCork wrote:
U-said-it wrote:BoneyCork should know better than anyone what overpopulation, combined with ancient coal burning power plants, can do to carbon emissions.
I live a certain lifestyle that I enjoy. I'm not prepared to change it, and I'm not prepared to feel guilty about living it. I apologise if that seems blunt and selfish, but...it is. There are millions of people like me, and youre not going to change our attitudes because we're idiots. Sorry.
It doesn't matter anyway. You live in a country where your opinion on this is meaningless. And, by the looks of things, China will become more efficient and less polluting than the USA in the next 10 or 20 years, as they've realized the economic and long term planning of this is for the best (I guess stuff like getting hit with enormous sandstorms due to erosion and a lack of trees puts things in perspective pretty quick).
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by BlackAura »

Quzar wrote:I dunno, I tend to think global warming is mostly overblown as a sign of human arrogance. We're such a large part of this planet that we've been able to spoil it in just a few hundred years...
No, the planet will be fine. There's no way we could really damage the planet itself, and I doubt that we have the ability to do anything catastrophic to the ecosystem either, short of nuking the entire surface of the planet.

The point is - do we make enough of a mess to change the climate enough to damage our own civilisation? We can certainly do that on a local level. See any large city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example. Or more modern instances of human intervention causing severe weather, flooding, desertification, erosion... Really, it wouldn't take much to completely screw us up - a few degrees change in temperature here, some slightly different rainfall patterns there, and suddenly there's not enough food or water to go around. The planet would be fine, and most plant and animal species would simply adapt. We wouldn't. Not with our present population level anyway.

Whether we actually have the ability to affect our environment that much... who knows? It's likely we can, although it's unclear by how much, or how quickly. If it happens over a couple of hundred years, we'll probably be able to adapt to it. It'll probably make all kinds of mess (wars, famine, drought, all that stuff), but as a species we'll probably make it though intact. If it happens in only a few decades, we're screwed.

That's really not the problem though. The problem is that our society in general is dependent upon being able to produce incredible amounts of energy, both mechanical and electrical, very cheaply. The amount of energy we waste would have been unthinkable even 100 years ago. Even our ability to produce food and water relies on this abundance of cheap energy.

Our primary means of energy production is still burning fossil fuels. There's a finite about of those, and whatever processes produce them occur on a geological timescale, so we're using them much more quickly than they can be produced. If we run out of those before we have the technology to replace them, we're totally screwed.

Both of these problems have pretty much the same solution, of course - to replace fossil fuels as our primary energy source. If the threat of global warming is a better motivating force than the threat of running out of energy, that's fine. Whatever it takes to get the job done. As long as we don't end up wasting time and resources on pointless crap (organic farming, for example).
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Re: Arctic Icecap to Dissapear in 20-30 years

Post by Quzar »

BlackAura wrote:
Quzar wrote:I dunno, I tend to think global warming is mostly overblown as a sign of human arrogance. We're such a large part of this planet that we've been able to spoil it in just a few hundred years...
No, the planet will be fine. There's no way we could really damage the planet itself, and I doubt that we have the ability to do anything catastrophic to the ecosystem either, short of nuking the entire surface of the planet.

The point is - do we make enough of a mess to change the climate enough to damage our own civilisation? We can certainly do that on a local level. See any large city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example. Or more modern instances of human intervention causing severe weather, flooding, desertification, erosion... Really, it wouldn't take much to completely screw us up - a few degrees change in temperature here, some slightly different rainfall patterns there, and suddenly there's not enough food or water to go around. The planet would be fine, and most plant and animal species would simply adapt. We wouldn't. Not with our present population level anyway.

Whether we actually have the ability to affect our environment that much... who knows? It's likely we can, although it's unclear by how much, or how quickly. If it happens over a couple of hundred years, we'll probably be able to adapt to it. It'll probably make all kinds of mess (wars, famine, drought, all that stuff), but as a species we'll probably make it though intact. If it happens in only a few decades, we're screwed.

That's really not the problem though. The problem is that our society in general is dependent upon being able to produce incredible amounts of energy, both mechanical and electrical, very cheaply. The amount of energy we waste would have been unthinkable even 100 years ago. Even our ability to produce food and water relies on this abundance of cheap energy.

Our primary means of energy production is still burning fossil fuels. There's a finite about of those, and whatever processes produce them occur on a geological timescale, so we're using them much more quickly than they can be produced. If we run out of those before we have the technology to replace them, we're totally screwed.

Both of these problems have pretty much the same solution, of course - to replace fossil fuels as our primary energy source. If the threat of global warming is a better motivating force than the threat of running out of energy, that's fine. Whatever it takes to get the job done. As long as we don't end up wasting time and resources on pointless crap (organic farming, for example).

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Most global warming activists seem to believe that by the end of their lifetime there will be no ice left on earth, we'll all be underwater and irradiated from the lack of any ozone in the atmosphere.

A few other things concern me as so many jump all over 'renewable' energies. First, the amount of rare elements required for so many of these technologies. Neodymium, lanthanum, platinum, indium, etc. at the rates they're being used some have estimated as little as 5 years till we run out of a few of them (of course it's as hard to put stock into this as that the ice will be gone in 20 years). Second, because of how long we've used forms of water power, from simple water wheels to hydroelectric plants (which are the same on generators basically...) we know well the effect that it can have on ecosystems in the long run, changing the face of landscapes if not carefully applied. What about wind power? How long we run out of wind eh? Ok, well, we won't 'run out' of wind, but the longterm effects of windfarms has not been studied (well, at least not that I've ever been able to find). I can imagine effects being as simple as altering the spread of pollen and such. The same goes for solar energy.

Yes, I very well may be insane, but part of the reason we're in a bind now is because someone found out that coal, then oil and gas were fantastic for generating energy and nobody questioned it. I can very much imagine a situation 100 years down the road with a whole different range of negative effects from trying to harvest the same amounts of energy from other sources.
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