Letters to the Editor
Valkyrie607
Published Letters: 121 Editor's Choice: 3
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@ Fred Bernanke
[Read the article: The cold truth about climate change]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I said: "Civilians can understand both meteorology and climate change, if they want to.
Species migrating north. Ice shelf shrinking. Ocean levels rising. Poles warming faster than the equator. 100-year droughts are now 10-year droughts. Tundra melting. CO2 content 30% above what it's been for the past 100,000 years."
Fred said: Yours is the Al Gore-as-scientist approach to this issue. It's as if you are saying that by looking out our windows and noticing it is raining that we, therefore, "understand" meteorology.
A straw man argument: I never said meteorology is comprehensible by simply looking out the window. I said it's comprehensible to those willing to do a bit of work and reading. Also, I never watched Gore's movie and I don't really care what he thinks about all this. I've reached these conclusions based on my own studies, research, and conversations.
Do you "understand" how we send people into orbit around the earth by watching the Shuttle takeoff on TV? Do you think there might be a few equations that needed solving (or inventing) before we could blast those things off?
Another straw man. Patronizing, to boot.
And, by the way, your Malthusian argument in an anti-capitalist cloak, has proven itself grievously flawed for centuries.
I guess my argument is Malthusian, in a sense, but not in the way Malthus is widely (mis)understood. Malthus was simply saying that our ability to produce children will always outstrip our ability to produce food to feed them all. Would you say he was wrong about that? It ties into the idea of carrying capacity. Humans have used technology to increase the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which we live, but that doesn't erase the existence of that carrying capacity.
You understand that humans must receive all of the calories they need to survive from the primary producers of the ecosystem--that is, the plants. There is a fixed amount of land on the surface of the planet, hence the amount of solar energy that can be converted to forms that are useful to us is limited. Currently ecologists estimate that humans use somewhere around 23% of the total output of those primary producers (Haberl et al, 2007). These estimates vary widely, unsurprisingly, which "makes it difficult to ascertain whether we are approaching crisis levels in our use of the planet's resources." (Rojstaczer et al, 2001). Nevertheless, the very fact that we are uncertain ought to inspire us to put on the brakes.
23% is a tremendous amount of the output of the earth's ecosystems for one species to be monopolizing. What will be the impact on other species when we reach 40%? 50%? Higher?
But keep up the good work, guy. At least I like your screen name.
If you really like my screen name, why do you call me "guy?" Just curious.
Try avoiding the straw men next time.
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Falsifiable claims
[Read the article: The cold truth about climate change]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wjamesau asked earlier whether climate change theories are falsifiable. The answer is yes. All we have to do is wait another 20 or 50 years, depending on which model you're looking at.
Climate change predicts certain events and effects. You've heard about them. Retreating glaciers, migrating species, melting permafrost, blah blah blah. All these things are happening, and lend support to climate change theory. But we're not going to know FOR SURE until a few decades down the road, when a.) everything is fine, or b.) New York is underwater and the entire southwest looks like the Sahara. Or whatever the final effect turns out to be.
We won't know for sure until then.
The problem is: if climate change theory turns out to be accurate, and we do nothing, the costs to human society are astronomical. This is why I brought up the precautionary principle before.
Suppose we decide to do something about climate change, and we're wrong, and we spend all this money retrofitting our economies for nothing. What's the worst-case scenario? Global economic depression, perhaps, that makes that of the 1930's look like a Sunday evening barbecue.
Suppose we decide to do nothing about climate change, assuming that it doesn't exist, and we turn out to be wrong. What's the worst-case scenario? Well, global economic depression--AND, on top of that, massive dislocation of coastal populations, plummeting agricultural outputs, civil wars, famines, disease, massive species die-offs.
In my mind, climate change is just a symptom of the untenability of our current system. Other symptoms include the carcinogenic air pollution affecting millions of people in cities worldwide, fishery depletion, soil degradation, deforestation, rising rates of species extinction, etc., etc., etc.
It is outrageous to me that we seem (thus far) unwilling to consider how profoundly immoral it is that we are grabbing up the natural resources, and trashing our ecosystem, without the slightest thought for how this will affect future generations. The warning has been raised. We have no excuse now: we must grapple with this issue. How will our children and grandchildren look at us if they're condemned to life in an ecological monoculture, where corn is the only plant, and cattle the only animal? It's an exaggeration, to be sure, but not a wild one. We're on the way there already. As I mentioned before, humans already monopolize about a third of the total ecological output of the world's ecosystems. Our children will probably survive, but at what cost? In what kind of world?
Click on my signature for a video that details the same argument I made above. Thanks to whoever posted the video earlier, it's an excellent contribution to the discussion.
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Who's a Pirate's favorite Chemist?...
[Read the article: The cold truth about climate change]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Svante ARRhenius!
BTW, thanks, Kirpi, for injecting a bit of sanity into the mix here. I'm an undergrad, and I'm going into environmental science, so although I'm no expert, I have access to a lot of people who are, and they are all concerned.