[Cid_Yama]

Yes of course, If we can just get rid of 6/7th of the population (not you of course), everything will be just hunky dory.

Do you see the ridiculousness of that thinking?

[Newfie]

Well it's difficult to discuss if we can't agree on what is baked in. For me it's a 1 billion population. That will kill our culture.

Unless we can agree to time scale and scope, even in some general way, it is very hard to discuss.

Can you lay out your time s ale and scope so we can compare ideas?

For sale of argument (assuming your talking to me) as I said above billion 200 years. Could be totally wrong and can agree to some other base line if that makes disscussion easier.

[Newfie]

Yes of course, If we can just get rid of 6/7th of the population (not you of course), everything will be just hunky dory.

Do you see the ridiculousness of that thinking?

Don't shoot the messenger Cid. Just saying what I think is already baked in.

BTW don't you believe human extinction is baked in due to run away warming?

[Cid_Yama]

Actually I was replying to Ibon's comment. Sorry for the confusion. (Which looking back, perhaps I misinterpreted.) (And having a laugh at myself and how others must perceive me.)

Yes extinction is, as you say, already baked it. I see no other conclusion.

But look at it this way. It was a good run. For as low as the majority of humanity is, we achieved great heights in our time here.

The music, the art, the philosophy, the sciences, yes, we were glorious in our time.

But, as Patton said;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPiH-LBna5I

[Ibon]

Letting go of prediction is wisdom. The wise sage accepts the unknowable and unknown. Those who take a fixed position are clinging to personal vendettas and grasping. This is not noble nor wise. It is weakness.

[Subjectivist]

Letting go of prediction is wisdom. The wise sage accepts the unknowable and unknown. Those who take a fixed position are clinging to personal vendettas and grasping. This is not noble nor wise. It is weakness.

But isn't story telling the fundamental human trait? At least going back to cave paintings many thousand years ago, humans always tell stories, about past present and future. Predictions are just a human way of telling stories

[Ibon]

Letting go of prediction is wisdom. The wise sage accepts the unknowable and unknown. Those who take a fixed position are clinging to personal vendettas and grasping. This is not noble nor wise. It is weakness.

But isn't story telling the fundamental human trait? At least going back to cave paintings many thousand years ago, humans always tell stories, about past present and future. Predictions are just a human way of telling stories

For sure. The destiny of an individual or a culture is never caste in stone and the best narratives always leave the future a question mark for that reason. There always remains a choice. Baked in consequences also represent choices even this late in the game.

Cid's voice of guaranteed extinction is an important one though, for this position provides the opportunity of generations emerging to fully reject this.

We need voices of hopelessness to galvanize those who will reject this. That is also a story of sorts.

[Cid_Yama]

Right.... this is neither story nor narrative. It's science.

Nothing personal or 'grasping'. Attacking the messenger shows weakness.

Those that don't accept what IS known are in denial or fools.

Sometimes there are no good choices left. Sometimes it is just too damn late.

[Cid_Yama]

From 3 years ago:

Here’s the question: Could some version of extinction or near-extinction overcome humanity, thanks to climate change — and possibly incredibly fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five million years ago, a five degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures seems to have occurred in just 13 years, according to a study published in the October 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently leaked IPCC draft report suggested for our future: “When I look at what the models predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths of populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the Spaniards get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which have high populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people alive?”

The IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get plentiful rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food supplies collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of these things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented scale, especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.

“Some scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C world,” Leifer comments. “While prudent, one wonders what portion of the living population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is that it’s just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or Antarctica.”

“All the evidence points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C global temperature rise above the 1850 ‘norm’ by mid-century, possibly much sooner. This guarantees a positive feedback, already underway, leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees above ‘norm’ and that is a level lethal to life. This is partly due to the fact that humans have to eat and plants can’t adapt fast enough to make that possible for the seven to nine billion of us — so we’ll die.”

link


Methane 'deliberately left out' of IPCC projections - UN Pachauri say's time about to run out on man

There are some possibilities that are deliberately left out of the IPCC projections, because we simply don’t have enough data yet to model them. Jason Box, a visiting scholar at the Byrd Polar Research Center told me in an email interview that: “The scary elephant in the closet is terrestrial and oceanic methane release triggered by warming.” The IPCC projections don’t include the possibility — some scientists say likelihood — that huge quantities of methane will be released from thawing permafrost and undersea methane hydrate reserves. Box said that the threshhold “when humans lose control of potential management of the problem, may be sooner than expected.”

The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, speaks for the scientific consensus when he says that time is fast running out to avoid the catastrophic collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends. What he recently told a group of climate scientist could be the most chilling headline of all for the U.N. report:

"We have five minutes before midnight."

link


The Limits of Human Adaptability

It seems to be widely assumed that humans can adapt to any amount of warming, on the basis that humans live in such a wide variety of climates now. We show that when examined in terms of the peak value of the wet-bulb temperature (Tw), which ultimately governs the possibility of transfer of metabolic heat to the environment, the worlds present-day climates are far less variable than one might think based on mean temperature. A warming of only a few degrees will cause large parts of the globe to experience peak Tw values that never occur today; 7C would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses (periods when the shedding of metabolic heat is thermodynamically impossible); and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today's population. It is unknown how much of our present 7- 10C cushion we can live without before experiencing significant problems, making it difficult to draw conclusions about more modest climate changes, but the limits themselves rest squarely on basic thermodynamics.

link


Last Hours

[onlooker]

If everyone really looked hard and unblinkingly at the true, raw facts of what horrors our lifestyle is creating and will produce, that would on the one hand be a step toward a kind unflinching honesty sorely lacking in our culture, and on the other hand would likely be sufficient in some cases to prompt deep changes in many peoples lifestyles and perhaps prompt other effective actions (and non-actions).

A small, very spoiled child might go through her day smashing things and always refusing to even look at the damages and harms she has caused to people and things. I think we ought to hold ourselves to ever so slightly moral standards than such utterly spoiled children and at least look at the damage we've inflicted on the world and its inhabitants.

I could not agree more. We have a world of such inequality and injustice and we all are accomplices because we are like witnesses to a crime and we do nothing. So at the very least we should all in the world realize what is occurring to our planet, to our freedoms, to our dignity as humans. To NOT look is almost as bad as those who do all sorts of reprehensible acts in this world.

[ralfy]

Letting go of prediction is wisdom. The wise sage accepts the unknowable and unknown. Those who take a fixed position are clinging to personal vendettas and grasping. This is not noble nor wise. It is weakness.

I would compare predictions with real data. For example,

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... g-collapse

Given this, I think a "fixed position" would involve assuming that economic output will keep rising indefinitely. But that can only happen if resource availability is significantly reversed.

[dohboi]

It is those who always require that every prediction end tied up with a little bow of hopium who are, of course, the ones most entranced by a narrative/story/myth. Not so much those who simply assess the science for what it is, no matter where it leads.

Though, of course, none of us can completely escape Story.

[Ibon]

Letting go of prediction is wisdom. The wise sage accepts the unknowable and unknown. Those who take a fixed position are clinging to personal vendettas and grasping. This is not noble nor wise. It is weakness.

I would compare predictions with real data. For example,

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... g-collapse

Given this, I think a "fixed position" would involve assuming that economic output will keep rising indefinitely. But that can only happen if resource availability is significantly reversed.

Correct. Which is the opposite. Polarities are like love affairs. Because we have this denial still resilient in those who take this fixed position that economic growth will rise indefinitely, we can find plenty just the polar opposite who see themselves as truth warriors by taking the fixed position that we are going extinct. This is a dance of sorts.

[dohboi]

[ralfy]

Correct. Which is the opposite. Polarities are like love affairs. Because we have this denial still resilient in those who take this fixed position that economic growth will rise indefinitely, we can find plenty just the polar opposite who see themselves as truth warriors by taking the fixed position that we are going extinct. This is a dance of sorts.

I think the opposite of economic growth is not extinction but economic de-growth. Also, for me the effects of de-growth as seen in the trends is just as bad as extinction. Given that, I don't see such a dance.

[dohboi]

"the effects of de-growth as seen in the trends is just as bad as extinction"

Care to explain? What trends? How could anything be as bad as extinction?

[onlooker]

Yeah, that does not quite make sense. How could anything be as bad as extinction!

[ennui2]

Yeah, that does not quite make sense. How could anything be as bad as extinction!

There are a fair number of "give me liberty or give me death" types who feel that ideology trumps basic preservation of life.

There really is a strong strain of ideological fear driving denialism. Their idea of the unacceptable Al Bartlett right-hand-list includes things like carbon taxes, banning new coal power plants, or mandating a phase-out of gas cars.

For people who place the invisible hand of the free market above all else, extinction is preferable to giving up these rights/privileges.

In fact I think when push comes to shove, this will become the dominant denialist rhetoric. It will no longer be denial of the science, but simply saying that treating the patient would be worse than just letting him die on the operating table.

[onlooker]

Good observation Ennui. Is that not our history. One whereby ideology ie. emotions trumped sound decisions. When at times we may have cooperated with each other we fought. Why? Probably because of some irreconcilable difference which in fact would be reconcilable if people were willing to compromise and not be so dogmatic. Religions, politics, racism just examples of issues whereby people just cannot agree on, no matter what. We lack at this stage in our evolution, emotional maturity. Problem is we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God like technology as E.O. Wilson stated.

[onlooker]

Well the reality of climate change seems to be getting ever more real.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... e-20150805
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here