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pstarr wrote:Dieoff won't be consequence of runaway global warming and climate chaos. Rather it'll be peak oil, peak fresh water, peak arable land, peak phosphorus, peak copper, peak H-3, peak this and peak that.

You can say it, but you can't back it up. You just arbitrarily remove AGW from the equation for no rational purpose.

Climate change is a minor environmental threat

Yeah, try saying that to people handling Category 5 hurricanes in caraibes, moosons in India and Bangladesh, heat waves in north Africa and India last summer (more than 50°C, people dying of heat in India clothes factories)
And wait until global warming will kill humans crops necessary to feed all those billions folks living in cities.
As soon as north and south Earth ice pole melt to water, global warming will go exponential and will shift from what you call "minor environmental threat" to "ELE", aka extinction level event.

pstarr wrote:Climate change is a minor environmental threat, a media distraction that allows us to put off the hard decisions. We must become conservatives all of us. Conserve what we have. Reuse plastic bags or we won't have any plastic bags in the future. Turn down the thermostat or we will freeze in the next years. Goes for left and right. Stop the eco-vacations and plant a tree.

Our obsession with climate change gives folks a break. It's a gift. Most folks who (claim to) worry about it really believes we have 50 years of grace, that we can keep debating the issue and discussing solutions. Meanwhile exponential resource depletion marches on. So we don't have 50 years of grace. But not because of abrupt climate change.

There is a lot of truth in your statements actually. In many ways climate change is just hanging in the air as this potential chaos decade after decade effectively taking a lot of people off the hook in facing the already stampeding elephant in the room which is the parasitic way our species has already plundered more than 50% of our planets terrestrial surface. plundered our resource base, plundered the habitat of countless flora and fauna. Climate change continues to get all the attention. Why? Because it is still off there in the future, still drawing our attention off there into the future, distracting us from devastation in real time right here and now.

There are parameters more relevant than climate change if you really want to see the impact of human overshoot.

Just one example:

http://www.iucnredlist.org/



Figure 1. RLIs for reef-forming corals, birds, mammals, and amphibians. Coral species are moving towards increased extinction risk most rapidly, while amphibians are, on average, the most threatened group. An RLI value of 1.0 equates to all species qualifying as Least Concern (i.e., not expected to become Extinct in the near future). An RLI value of 0 equates to all species having gone Extinct. A constant RLI value over time indicates that the overall extinction risk for the group is constant. If the rate of biodiversity loss were reducing, the RLI would show an upward trend.

I declare that Pstarr has won this debate for now..... maybe this will change in the next five years but for now climate change is mostly a distraction.

Ibon wrote:

pstarr wrote:Climate change is a minor environmental threat, a media distraction

I have to respectfully disagree. Climate change is causing sea level rise that is already impacting coastal cities, as well as creating droughts and killer heat waves. What will happen as we see 10-15 feet of sea level rise and much hotter temperatures?

You don't have to look too far down the road to see that low lying areas in many of the world's great coastal cities will have to be abandoned and parts of many of the worlds great agricultural areas will be either under water or dealing with drought in decades.

And thats just for starters.


Cheers!

While what Pstarr and Ibon are saying are true and I appreciate the expertise of Ibon on ecological matters, I must also question how our species can ignore what can only be described as an existential threat. Because, how can our species or any other higher life form adapt to conditions similar to what existed and occurred 250 million years ago during the Great Dying ie. The greatest ELE ever on Earth. I pose this question because I do not have a sufficient climate science background to even attempt to answer it. I think humanity will have to abandon FF sooner rather than later, that is just my personal opinion,I have arrived at. And then deal with the aftermath of that.

Climate change is a minor environmental threat, a media distraction??

Sorry. I can't put ocean acidification and coral reef bleaching on that shelf, especially considering decades of overfishing and how many humans rely on the seas as their primary protein source. Indeed, we are putting all of our critical ecosystems into over-exploitation stress at the same time they are increasingly undergoing climate stress, and I doubt the consequences will be non-synergistic. Consequences are likely to be greater than the sum of the stress factors.

pstarr wrote:Our obsession with climate change gives folks a break. It's a gift. Most folks who (claim to) worry about it really believes we have 50 years of grace
...
Few know or care that peak oil is playing now.

These key statements very clearly explain why it is you want to marginalize AGW. It's all wrapped up in a sense that it's stealing mindshare away from peak-oil, your most favored doom. This is not me strawmanning. This is exactly what you're telling us. You're not shying away from it. It's right there. It's not about the science. It's about emotion (your personal frustration that you cannot control what people talk about).

Listen, Pstarr, why is it that you can concede to other dooms, like the population bomb or soil depletion or fresh water without downplaying them? The only difference is that there's more press coverage of AGW than these others (especially population which we all know is a third-rail topic).

It's brazenly anti-intellectual to go about trying to debunk or discredit science just because you don't like the fact people are talking about it more than some adjacent topic.

How popular the topic is should have nothing to do with whether the science is real or not.

Really, this is bias personified. I have a hard time believing that you truly are an AGW denier at your core. I don't think even you are that dumb. I think you are sort of shaping your rhetoric purely for a given effect, even if you have to be intellectually dishonest with yourself to do it. It's sort of the approach of a flip-flopping propagandist who will contradict himself if necessary to gain the desired effect in influencing public opinion one way or another.

If you've always behaved this way it would explain why the public shunned you during your activist days. Being an agent provocateur with no underlying personal integrity is not that different from being a troll.

Plantagenet wrote:

Ibon wrote:

pstarr wrote:Climate change is a minor environmental threat, a media distraction

I have to respectfully disagree. Climate change is causing sea level rise that is already impacting coastal cities, as well as creating droughts and killer heat waves. What will happen as we see 10-15 feet of sea level rise and much hotter temperatures?


Cheers!

The image of a flooded metropolis targets humanity. The salt marsh or mangrove bay just outside of metropolitan areas simply shift and extend inland with the rising sea level having minimal impact. Here again we see how climate change disproportionately affects kudzu apes. It is a major environmental threat to humanity.. Less of a threat to the complexity of natural ecosystems with some exceptions like coral reefs.

If climate change rises sea levels, displaces humans, curtails agriculture production in marginal areas etc. we will witness the beginning of the depopulation of our species on the planet. What happens when human landscapes and our crop land and pastureland recede? Nature recolonizes quickly this former human habitat.

The media attention of climate change has everything to do with how it will potentially imperil homo sapiens. Which it will disproportionately. There is something profoundly disingenuous when you see the media discuss climate change as imperiling our planet. What the media is really indirectly telling you, what many folks are actually indirectly stating is that climate change is a potential threat to our rapacious parasitic dominance on our mother earth. If climate change will weaken kudzu apes dominant position on the planet then we have to consider that from the perspective of the rest of life on the planet this may not be a bad deal.

You couple this with peak oil and all the other feedbacks, what Ghung refers to as a thousand cuts, and then you slowly recognize that those thousand cuts, those incisions, those blades of consequences, are targeting one species in particular. Unfortunately collateral damage in the rise of extinctions of other species cannot be avoided but the status of critically endangered species is not a future threat but an already profound reality largely ignored by the media. And it has nothing to do with climate change. Ever wonder at this glaring difference between the media's attention on climate change as a mere threat when the already devastating loss of biodiversity barely raises an eyebrow any more? Could it have something to do perhaps with the fact that climate change will disproportionately affect one species in particular? Which leads to the question that deserves highlighting

Could one then conclude that concern of climate change is simply the extension of the hubris that sees our place on the planet and our current life styles as sacrosanct? If you have the courage to recognize this then you have to conclude that concern for climate change is double speak for not wanting to alter in any way kudzu apes rapacious dominance on the planet.

Now that it is upon us let us take a moment to appreciate and embrace climate change as one of the corrective measures to lessen the lethal parasitic grip one species, homo sapiens, has on our mother earth. Let us embrace climate change as the ultimate change in the trajectory of our species away from severe overshoot and moving toward correction.

Many will read these words and interpret misanthropic sentiments. This could not be further from the truth. The collapse of the linear trend of 200 years of exponential growth of kudzu apes on the planet is exactly what will long term save our species, increase our species resiliency, and enable kudzu apes to redefine ourselves away from being a rogue parasite and once again become and integrated member of the community of life on our mother earth. That means that 75% of our numbers will disappear in the next couple of generations. For me the harrowing reality of what this means is equally balanced with the healing that will take place as flora and fauna will reclaim stolen habitat.

Further to my last post there is quite an eloquent way to understand human overshoot when you consider that the last 200 years can be regarded as the Great Biotic Exchange. This occurred when the biomass of natural ecosystems was exchanged for the biomass of humans and their slave species; livestock and crops that feed us. The sum total of biomass remains pretty much constant but human agency simply replaced the rich tapestry of biodiversity around the planet with more mono culture humans and more of our mono culture slave crops and livestock.

Forces that disproportionately target Homo sapiens will slow down, brake and swing the pendulum of this Great Biotic Exchange back in the other direction. This represents the correction of human overshoot.

My hypothesis is that climate change will be a contributing force to slow down this Great Biotic Exchange and start to reverse it.

This Great Biotic Exchange is nearing its apex. It's peak so to speak. Peak Kudzu Ape is upon us.

It is truly so intriguing to have the perspective that Ibon has in that he is seeing this epic period in the history of humanity from the lens of all life not just our species. One can take this view to say we are no more deserving of continuing than any other species. Can we forgo our parasitic dominance for the sake of a rich healthy planet that most of us inherited when we were born but in the brief time of our lives have managed to degrade and make less prolific via the extinction process. Because for every Ibon they"'re are at least 1000 persons who don't seem to value, nature, other species or even our own very much. They are just concerned with themselves and their immediate progeny. Or am I wrong about that. No we will not voluntarily do it but I do believe the natural course of events will knock us off the high self made perch we created

Overshoot underlies all our problems.

Humanities inability to project and plan accordingly renders us paralyzed.

We can argue all day about exactly how we are going down, but the underlying issues never change, short of meteor hit or Yellowstone blowing.

I believe that underlying truth is something we all broadly agree in.

Ib wrote:

"Forces that disproportionately target Homo sapiens will slow down, brake and swing the pendulum of this Great Biotic Exchange back in the other direction. This represents the correction of human overshoot. "

Indeed, it is important to note that human flesh, and that of our livestock..., are the largest pools of uniform food on the planet now by far. The species that most effectively evolve to take advantage of these food sources will win, particularly after collapse makes institutions like CDC inoperable.

This is another thing that people who are absolutely sure that some enclave of humans somewhere will somehow manage to survive...maybe they will, but they will be faced with multiple and populous species specialized in eating their bodies, and the bodies of their support animals and plants.

Oh, and it's nice to see pete make an actually valuable contribution to one of the threads on this forum for once. I hope that's a trend that continues.

I was thinking more on the microbial side of things, but yeah, there are plenty of those around as well.

http://www.newsweek.com/buruli-ulcer-au ... -us-669684

No comment......

M_B_S wrote:

No comment......

It's waaaay cooler on the west coast.

Yep. This is the new normal. PStarr will keep denying as is his wont.

Its much colder here in Germany than @ US east coast...

Maybe Europe has a problem with its heat pump:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace ... cc75b7f6f4

Science #WhoaScience

AUG 3, 2017 @ 06:26 AM 237,918 Your Ultimate Guide to Buying Bitcoin
Global Ocean Circulation Appears To Be Collapsing Due To A Warming Planet
A recent study published in Nature outlines research by a team of Yale University and University of Southhampton scientists. The team found evidence that Arctic ice loss is potentially negatively impacting the planet's largest ocean circulation system. While scientists do have some analogs as to how this may impact the world, we will be largely in uncharted territory.
**************
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/documents/4219 ... 2c187f805e

We told you so 12 years ago

PEAK OIL

M_B_S

Ibon wrote:Further to my last post there is quite an eloquent way to understand human overshoot when you consider that the last 200 years can be regarded as the Great Biotic Exchange. This occurred when the biomass of natural ecosystems was exchanged for the biomass of humans and their slave species; livestock and crops that feed us. The sum total of biomass remains pretty much constant but human agency simply replaced the rich tapestry of biodiversity around the planet with more mono culture humans and more of our mono culture slave crops and livestock.

Forces that disproportionately target Homo sapiens will slow down, brake and swing the pendulum of this Great Biotic Exchange back in the other direction. This represents the correction of human overshoot.

My hypothesis is that climate change will be a contributing force to slow down this Great Biotic Exchange and start to reverse it.

This Great Biotic Exchange is nearing its apex. It's peak so to speak. Peak Kudzu Ape is upon us.

A recent article that highlighted the impact of The Great Biotic Exchange I was discussing earlier on this thread.

Today, the biomass of Earth’s human population is estimated to be ten times greater than the combined biomass of all the planet’s wild mammals. (I use the term “wild” here advisedly.) Meanwhile, if we look at the weight of our domesticated animals—cows and goats and pigs—the situation is even more extreme. Their biomass is roughly twenty-five times greater than that of wild mammals. And if you add us and our beasts together the ratio is thirty-five to one. In numerical terms, we are a hugely successful species—an astonishingly successful species—and our success has come at the expense of other living things.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements ... A0NTc5NQS2

Humans would be the biomass with technology, recorded history, etc.

There is no certainty that humans, especially humans armed with Science, seed banks, and genetic engineering, cannot manage the ecology of a planet. If you can measure the impact of humans, you can direct such impacts to favor the simplified ecology and monocultures. For example I saw hundreds of square miles of the MidWest where they spray chemicals on sterile soil media and grow bumper crops of corn/soy/wheat in rotation, with each crop suppressing the pests and adding nutrients needed by the next crop. There are few weeds and little need for cultivation or herbicides to control weeds, as they have largely been eradicated from these areas.

As for the planet warming - that is what A/C is for. The Solar PV roof on my home makes twice the energy needed to cool the place, enough to run the A/C, the lighting, and all the electronic toys, and to offset the nighttime electricity consumption.

After all, we have little choice in the matter. The presence of 7.5+ billion humans IS the Sixth Great Extinction event.

KaiserJeep wrote: For example I saw hundreds of square miles of the MidWest where they spray chemicals on sterile soil media and grow bumper crops of corn/soy/wheat in rotation, with each crop suppressing the pests and adding nutrients needed by the next crop. There are few weeds and little need for cultivation or herbicides to control weeds, as they have largely been eradicated from these areas.

Uumm? KJ isn't one of the chemicals they spray on an herbicide?