And if you think anyone out there is suggesting that " GW [is] the be all [to] end all", I think you would be wrong. How do you ever end up at that conclusion?
Well, Steve and Karen, I have to say that Karen is not totally wrong about that. I have studied it for the past year or so (since the last IPCC report came out) as best as I can do it part time and more or less on my own (though not totally so), and have come to tentative conclusion that GW (more properly speaking "climate change") in fact is "the be all [to] end all" phenomenon, at least potentially so. I posted an article a few weeks ago that at least partially explains why I think that:
Message 24521947
I agree that it sounds loony to claim it, and it took me awhile to accept the possibility that at least the beginnings of the really serious consequences could well occur in the lifetimes of a lot of people now alive, but--so it is. Climate is so fundamental to how we live that if there are radical changes in it, it really isn't all that surprising that there will be radical changes in how we live.
A nice brief, beginners history of how scientists came to our current understanding of the phenomenon is here:
aip.org
A longer and more complicated--but for me, more satisfying--account is here:
aip.org
These essays are written by Spencer Weart, whose biography is:
SPENCER R. WEART is Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland, USA. Originally trained as a physicist, he is now a noted historian specializing in the history of modern physics and geophysics.
In case you think he is just webnut, his book, The Discovery of Global Warming, on which the above essays (and the others that are on his website) is published by Harvard University Press:
hup.harvard.edu
I know it goes against our necessary belief that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, just as it always has, to think that basic processes on which we depend will radically change in the not too distant future, and even more so that collective human actions could actually cause (or "force," to use the climatologists' jargon) this to happen, but ... so it appears to be.
As for the question of whether it's too late to do anything about it--that is a subject of some controversy. It is fairly clear, though, that positive feedbacks being what they are, if it isn't too late now, it will probably be too late sometime within the next couple of decades. It doesn't mean that every species, or even every human, will die off, but it will mean a great many species will simply disappear, unable to adapt, and the human population problem will be solved for quite awhile. Human ingenuity being what it is, some humans will likely survive even under terrible conditions, but it may well become a "Mad Max" world. Our collective hubris will once again lead to disaster. The greater the hubris, the greater the disaster, and ours is so great that we don't even know that we have it anymore.
Such are my cheery thoughts for the evening. |
