Can we really Save the Planet

[Tommy T.]

Maybe I missed a comment when reviewing this topic? I have thought for years that aid to poorer countries with growing populations might be tied to mandatory birth control? Yes, I realize this would be unpopular politically and also smacks of too much authority, but what else can be done to reduce population growth? Many developed countries with better educated populations are already witnessing slower population growth and even negative. But in a poor country, what other things are there to do when you don't have a cell phone or cable TV? Well you have a snuggle and....?

Heating and cooling are cyclical, I believe, but I also believe human activity has made the situation much worse and accelerated the overheating - especially since the advent of industrialization with no mind for pollution. I think greed and politics are root causes for our current situation. Few people want to pay more for power, water, recycling or higher prices for beer, Tanduay, cars homes? I just saw and article online about how soda manufacturers were on board for recycling - until it started to cost them... then they mostly bailed.

I see no easy solutions - maybe none at all. I am saddened by the legacy we already inherited and have grossly perpetuated to pass on to our children (I have none but I feel sorry for future generations who will inherit our problems).

Anyway... those are some of my opinions here... They may be wrong, but they are still my opinions...

[Guy F.]

17 hours ago, Jollygoodfellow said:

Where is securely stored in a typhoon? If the wind destruction does not get you the flooding might. 

That would be a valid concern at most locations. Not at mine. It's 50m above sea level and slightly above the surrounding land.

[earthdome]

9 hours ago, Tommy T. said:

Maybe I missed a comment when reviewing this topic? I have thought for years that aid to poorer countries with growing populations might be tied to mandatory birth control? Yes, I realize this would be unpopular politically and also smacks of too much authority, but what else can be done to reduce population growth? Many developed countries with better educated populations are already witnessing slower population growth and even negative. But in a poor country, what other things are there to do when you don't have a cell phone or cable TV? Well you have a snuggle and....?

Economic growth can effect population growth. For a very poor country economic growth which results in better infrastructure for water, food, power, etc. can increase population growth. But as the economy modernizes even further population growth starts declining.

[Tommy T.]

30 minutes ago, earthdome said:

Economic growth can effect population growth. For a very poor country economic growth which results in better infrastructure for water, food, power, etc. can increase population growth. But as the economy modernizes even further population growth starts declining.

That is a valid point. However, I am thinking of fairly poor countries that I have visited - including the P. I.. It is not unusual for the very poorest to have large families of 8, 10 or more kids. In Fiji, the locals told me that having lots of kids was their version of Social Security because then all the kids would take care of the parents in their old age. I guess that, to me, some of the very poorest people have some of the largest families and that perpetuates the poverty? Pardon me for citing another example? I remember seeing an article in National Geographic a few years ago about land ownership in some poor part of Africa. There, the family typically started out with some reasonable area of land inherited from the father. Each male kid would receive an equal share upon the father's demise which effectively divided the original chunk - let's say one acre to make the example? - into tenths or eighths or whatever of an acre. Then each of these kids had large families too so the eighths were further divided again. There were photos from the latest divisions showing - in one instance - the tiny little bits of land now owned after so many divisions - big enough for a few plants for subsistence (maybe) and not much more. This was causing some rivalry among siblings including violence in the more extreme cases. And I don't see modernization going very quickly but rather aid organizations and governments just trying to get enough food and medicine to keep them from dying. And the whole situation is getting worse because of apparent climate change that is further reducing the arability of the remaining land holdings...

Sorry for the long explanation - I tend to get long winded as I try to give complete responses. I will try to keep them shorter...

[Jollygoodfellow]

3 hours ago, Tommy T. said:

Sorry for the long explanation - I tend to get long winded as I try to give complete responses. I will try to keep them shorter...

No need to be but for easier reading a break in the continuous sentencing would help. 

[Tommy T.]

7 hours ago, Jollygoodfellow said:

No need to be but for easier reading a break in the continuous sentencing would help.

Thanks for the tip! Sometimes I am typing so quickly to get my thoughts down with reasonable grammar before I forget them. Then I forget that basic grammar error of making paragraphs too.

[Kuya John]

Concerns on Climate Change by David Attenborough........... David Attenborough: polluting planet may become as reviled as slavery | Television & radio | The Guardian

[robert k]

1 hour ago, Kuya John said:

Concerns on Climate Change by David Attenborough........... David Attenborough: polluting planet may become as reviled as slavery | Television & radio | The Guardian

Same guy who hoaxed the walrus falling to their deaths but didn't show the polar bears, possibly their own drone, that they had a cameraman blocking the safe escape route and so on,  that made them waddle off the cliff?

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/netflix-is-lying-about-those-falling-walruses-its-another-tragedy-porn-climate-hoax

[Heeb]

45 minutes ago, robert k said:

Same guy who hoaxed the walrus falling to their deaths but didn't show the polar bears, possibly their own drone, that they had a cameraman blocking the safe escape route and so on,  that made them waddle off the cliff?

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/netflix-is-lying-about-those-falling-walruses-its-another-tragedy-porn-climate-hoax

Pardon the pun but it may be a crock.

From wiki

Crockford is a signatory of the International Conference on Climate Change's 2008 Manhattan Declaration,^[10] which states that "Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity...appear to have only a very small impact on global climate," and "Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history while global warming has generally been highly beneficial."^[11] Between at least 2011 and 2013, she received payment from The Heartland Institute, in the form of $750 per month, which Crockford states was to provide summaries of published papers that might not have been covered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report.^[1] This payment has been construed as an undisclosed conflict of interest, by blogs such as Desmog Blog.^[2] Her response to such claims was a disclosure of the job description, how much she was paid, and the duration of the contract.^[1]

Although claims made on Crockford's blog have been called into question by polar bear scientists, the blog has been widely cited by climate change denying websites, with over 80% citing it as their primary source of information on polar bears.^[12] Critics point out that none of Crockford's claims regarding the effects of climate change on polar bears has undergone peer review, nor has she ever published any peer-reviewed articles whose main focus is polar bears.^[2][12] In 2017 Crockford was accused in the environmental publication The Narwhal by polar bear scientist Ian Stirling as having "zero" credibility on polar bears. “The denier websites have been using her and building her up as an expert,” he told the website.^[13]

[Tommy T.]

As far as I am concerned... the debate and scientific evidence is not finished. Maybe it's true - my opinion, which is worth nothing really - is that it is true... There, I have made my statement. This article is a bit long, but salient, I believe. For those of you who will read the entire article, I totally expect contrasting comments and opinions... That's why we are here, right?

Please consider this article I just found today on MSNBC.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-decade-we-finally-woke-up-to-climate-change/ar-AAK4dNg?li=BBnb7Kz

This decade, many people around the world woke up to a grim reality: Climate change is here, it’s happening now, and it could very easily get much, much worse.

These 10 years were punctuated by a series of deadly, dramatic, devastating events. Hurricanes like Sandy, Maria, and Harvey fundamentally changed the communities they barreled into, leaving behind scars that have yet to heal. Stronger and stronger heat waves forced communities across the country and world into dangerous swelter. Wildfires tore up hundreds of thousands of acres in a flash.

Climate records fell left and right. Hottest-ever year for the planet’s atmosphere? Check. Hottest-ever year for its oceans? Also check. Puny, unprecedentedly tiny stretches of Arctic sea ice? Check, check, check.

The underlying force beneath the changes is indisputable. Steadily increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels, are trapping extra heat near Earth’s surface. That warms Earth as a whole. The outcome is both straightforward—a hotter planet—and incredibly complex, as changes cascade through the oceans, atmosphere, soil, rocks, trees, and every living thing on the planet.

“God, this was a terrible decade,” says Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Let’s make the next one less bad.”

We wrecked records large and small

The last decade was the hottest ever recorded, flashing a warning sign to anyone who was paying attention. On average, the annual temperatures over the years hover a little less than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) higher now than they did from 1950 to 1980; the last five years alone was the hottest stretch ever recorded. So far, 2019 is shaping up to be the second hottest year ever, about 1.7 degrees F (0.94 degree C) above that long-term average.

That number might not sound like much, but its effects are large. Each little shift in the average increases the likelihood of extreme hot events. And just little shifts in the overall amount of heat stored in the oceans, air, and water can have huge effects on the planet.

For example, scientists think the planet was only about 10.8 degrees F colder (6 degrees C), on average, during the last ice age 20,000 or so years ago. But at that time a huge ice sheet covered North America, extending as far south as Long Island. The world looked very different, and there was only a small change in average temperature.

The hottest hot temperatures are also creeping higher—exactly what scientists would expect. As the average shifts upward, the likelihood of the extremely hot moments grows. Sure enough, “extreme” heat events have come with more frequency in the past decade, and that pattern is only expected to intensify.

There’s another important dimension to the overall warming, which is that it’s not happening evenly over the year or over distances. Winters are warming up faster than summers. The change in minimum temperatures between 2009 and 2018 (the last ten years that we have records for; 2019 records do not exist yet) was 1.34 degrees F. With milder winters come a whole host of unsettling, ecosystem-reshaping changes: Earlier springs cause a mismatch between pollinators and plant flowering times. More rain and less snow, and earlier-melting snow, affect water availability through the summer and fall. Unfrozen lakes, thawing permafrost, and open water appear where there should be ice.

Equally alarming and even more notable change is apparent in the oceans. While air temperatures tend to wobble around from year to year, responding to big patterns like El Niño—the periodic Pacific water-warming weather event—the ocean smooths out the signal, integrating all the warming that’s happened over past years. It responds more slowly and more steadily to changes happening above its surface, and what it’s telling us is clear.

The ocean has sucked up over 90 percent of all the extra heat trapped by human-caused climate change, and that signal is already apparent in its surface temperatures. Marine heat waves, like the heat waves we feel on land, and bigger changes—ones that could affect weather patterns around the entire planet—may be coming sooner than we think.

An icy tale tells us we’re in trouble

Earth’s ice served as the most obvious signpost of change over the past decade. The Arctic experienced about 1.8 F degrees (1 degree C) of warming in the past decade alone—compared to just under 1 degree C for the planet at large over the past 50 years. And its ice and frozen landscapes are responding just as sensitively as scientists predicted they would.

In 2012, nearly the entire Greenland ice sheet turned to slush, gushing cascades of melt into its coastal waters. Then the softening happened again, and again. Arctic sea ice bottomed out at its lowest ever recorded extent in 2012 as well, and has hovered at historic lows ever since, distorting “normal” weather patterns that depend on Arctic cold.

West Antarctica’s towering glaciers, home to enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet or more if they melted, have begun an inexorable retreat. Almost every single glacier in Earth’s high mountains is shrinking now, reshaping life in those high elevation zones. It’s also hitting life far downstream, where billions of people depend on the water that has long been sourced from snow and ice in the high peaks above.

Both ocean-trapped heat and melting ice contributed to record-breaking sea levels across much of the planet. A warmer ocean expands, driving those levels higher, and simultaneously, melt from Greenland and Antarctica has added about 36 millimeters of extra fresh water to the world’s oceans in the past 10 years, and the rate is jacking up every year. The injection of fresh water is changing the composition of the ocean in the Far North, which is in turn slowing down the conveyor belt of current from north to south that controls the world’s weather, with uncertain—but not positive—effects.

Behind all of the change is one clear driver: atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 2009, atmospheric CO2 concentrations hovered around 390 parts per million. By 2014, the number blew past 400 parts per million. Today, we hover around 410 ppm. The planet hasn’t seen concentrations that high since at least 2.6 million years ago. And at that time, no ice sheet existed in the northern polar regions and forests grew on Antarctica, sea levels were likely more than 40 feet higher than today, and the planet as a whole operated under very different conditions.

“This last decade mattered a lot and it looked pretty bad,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA GISS. “We’ve just got to make it so the next one is different.”

How did people change attitudes around climate change?

The physical patterns of climate change are becoming clearer and clearer. Alongside those physical changes, attitudes are also shifting.

Throughout the 2000s, explains Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Americans were engaged with the question of climate change. A 2007 IPCC report stoked conversation about how to deal with the issue, as did political communities. Scientists were speaking out.

But even the belief that climate was changing—let alone whether solutions should be pursued—dropped precipitously in the U.S. between 2008 and 2010, for a suite of political and social reasons. The first part of the decade, Leiserowitz says, was spent rebuilding attention to and interest in climate change as a major issue.

At the same time, scientists have developed new techniques to determine exactly how much more likely an event—from a hurricane to a heat wave to a wildfire—was because of climate change. They can link the wider patterns of change directly to a weather event. That kind of explicit linkage is changing the way people think about the broader issue, he says.

Climate change supercharged Hurricane Harvey, for example, adding an extra 20 percent of rain to what might have been expected. Clear messaging that links the science with the impact influences the way people understand the causes of such events.

In the past few years, public interest in and concern about climate change has increased dramatically. In 2010, 59 percent of the U.S. adults the Yale program surveyed thought global warming was happening; by this year, that number was up to 67 percent. In 2009, 31 percent of respondents thought global warming would harm them personally; by this year, that number was up to 42 percent.

And in the past year, activity has exploded among young people. Youth climate activists are gathering, millions deep, to bring attention to their stolen futures. Scientific teams are issuing stronger and stronger warnings. Global attention to the problem and the potential solutions is growing. But at the same time, the action that’s been taken so far is far from enough.

“A lot of people are starting to connect the dots,” says Leiserowitz. “Saying, oh my god, this event, is it climate change? And for a larger swath of the population, they’re starting to see it too, asking, ‘Huh, what’s going on with this record-setting event after record-setting event? Are these things connected?’”

“It was a very bad decade,” says Stokes. “I’d say we lost nine years of the decade, but we really started getting somewhere in the last 12 months. There’s a whole new energy and dynamism,” and that, she says, could signal that the next decade in climate might, hopefully, be different than the last.

Edited December 22, 2019 by Tommy T.