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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (51226)	3/1/2008 8:18:26 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544091

>>Seems to me that the salient distinction is that ocean rising is gradual and a nuclear blast is abrupt. Ergo the latter is much worse. All else being equal, slow catastrophes just don't have the impact that sudden ones do.<< Karen - Yes, but, when you imagine NYC being made completely uninhabitable, just think about the chaos that would precede the event, even with plenty of warning. Lots of people with lots of economic interest in that real estate. How long would it take to untangle that in any kind of orderly way? Ten years? Twenty? We might not have that much warning when the tipping point is reached. And doesn't the total impact depend on the scale as well as the suddenness? Anyway, as I've already pointed out, by the time we got to that point, we'd be dealing with a lot of other things as well. Disrupted food supplies, a lack of potable water, powerful monsoons, and increased tropical storm and tornadic activity worldwide. Not to be all Chicken Little about it. I'm just saying that people seem to think of a gradually rising sea as being the only effect, which does make it seem like nothing to get bent out of shape about. I don't know the answers on GW, or whether the anthropogenic aspect of it is important enough to bother about. But I do know that some rather disturbing things are happening. For example, the loss of the arctic ice cap, and the melting of the arctic and sub-arctic permafrost. That ice cap reflects a lot of solar energy into space. It used to do it year-round. Now it's looking like it may be only a few years before most of it is gone. The permafrost contains millions and millions of tons of frozen methane. If most of that gas is released into the atmosphere it could rapidly accelerate warming, because methane is 50 times more efficient than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. I'm sure you've heard all this. I don't know the answers. I'm just saying that people who brand anyone who is concerned about it a loony may be wrong. - Allen