Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

For the record, I have already come to terms with and have been rethinking my 'prejudices against France'

May I remind you that the most rightist French politician is considered by many standards the most liberal even by a die-hard American democrat. At a point that a "libéral" in France means a libertarian
But I'm sure a cultured person as you is well aware of this.

Muffled against the bitter artic cold by thick white fur and layers of fat, the polar bear lives and hunts in the snowbound lands and ice flows surrounding the North Pole. A strong swimmer and a lone predator, it is at home ice flows, which may carry it far from its original locality.

The polar bear is found on the arctic coasts and islands of the five countries around the North Pole, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway and Russia. It is the only species that still lives throughout its original range, with an estimated 20,000 still in the wild.

However, even in the seemingly pristine Arctic environment, polar bears are threatened by the spread of hormone-disrupting chemicals and global warming. This affects the polar ice edge ecosystem, the habitat of walrus, seals and penguins, as well as bears.

Global warming could already be having a negative impact on polar bears. In Canada's Hudson Bay (see map), numbers have been declining according to a study by Canadian Wildlife Services. Ice on the bay is melting an average of three weeks earlier than in the mid-1970s. This forces polar bears to retreat further inland before they have been able to replenish their reserves of fat by feeding on seal pups, which live on the ice.

The polar bears in the Hudson Bay are unique in the Arctic because they fast for six to eight months of hibernation and rely on winter hunting for survival. Longer ice-free periods during the artic summer leave polar bears stranded onshore for longer periods. The delay in freeze-up causes polar bears to lose critical fat reserves affecting reproduction and the ability of pregnant females to produce enough milk for their cubs. Scientists can already document a 15 percent drop in birth rates.

blatham wrote:

But again, my point was the unexpected and unknowable peripheral consequences which arise with climate change. It will not be a matter of crops moving peacefully and slowly polewards.

Blatham, saying climate change causes unexpected consequences is like saying after spring, there is summer. But why is it that you always imply that the consequences of CC are ALWAYS bad ?

If I were a reasonable person, I would find deeply suspicious that the media headlines always present bad consequences of GW, omitting for example to say the mild winter in Europe has saved billion $ in heating or California's orange industry has lost 1,5 billion $ this winter because of ... freezing.
But I'm sure you are a reasonable person and you have seen it. :wink:

...increased costs for air conditioning.

Of course, there are rather a lot of less developed places with colored folks elsewhere but they aren't really nearly so important.

"No question this would be a change (always good, says okie) and no question certain positives would eventually become visible, but in the meantime things would get very ugly indeed. Thus the pine beetle example I offered earlier"

I promised a link... it is now up
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19981

HOW worried do you reckon people in developing nations -- who are dying from hunger and other causes at the rate of 30,000 a day -- are about global warming? It seems like a stupid question because the answer is so obvious. But the answer is all important. It demonstrates why the supposed No.1 ethical concern of our generation (global warming) is in the main misguided self-interest dressed up as a moral crusade.
Hundreds of millions of people are already living in environmental conditions that are far worse than anything that will occur as a result of greenhouse warming, even according to the grimmest projections by green groups.

And our response? As a nation, we are now obsessed with fussing about speculative future harm while failing to come anywhere close to meeting the international benchmark of donating 0.7 per cent of gross national income to the developing world.

This gross distortion in our ethical priorities is so acute that it can't simply be explained as a judgment problem, something that will be corrected as we become more enlightened. It goes deeper than that.

It highlights the overwhelmingly self-interested nature of the human species, which is exactly the reason, if climate warming projections are right, why we managed to mess up the planet. Scientists, social commentators and politicians are increasingly engaged in the complex process of sifting through the conflicting climate data to ascertain how much environmental degradation will occur in the foreseeable future.

And the added cost of a warm year due to air conditionning is minuscule compared to the added cost due to heating in a cold year.

Interesting to me that Walter who has frequently excoriated others--those he disagrees with--for posting unsourced information feels no responsibility to do so himself.

blatham wrote:

...increased costs for air conditioning.

Air conditioning costs increase NOT with GW but with standard of living. And the added cost of a warm year due to air conditionning is minuscule compared to the added cost due to heating in a cold year.

In this specific instance, you may be right or wrong on the figures (as Walter suggests). But the point was more general than that. You avoided consideration of negatives while pointing only to the positives.

blatham wrote:

Of course, there are rather a lot of less developed places with colored folks elsewhere but they aren't really nearly so important.

I usually don't reply to such misplaced ironies but you seem so out of touch that I will.
Temperatures in low latitudes (say 20°S to 20°N) haven't pratically not changed over the 20th century and are not expected to change. Tropical oceans' temperature for example haven't changed more than +- 1°C for millions of years while the Earth witness many glacial-interglacial cycles. And in case you don't know, this is not a warm climate which affect poor countries and poor people but poverty and bad governement. A mean annual temperature of 27°C in Singapore hasn't prevented it to prosper. Where I live, it's 13°C. In bustling desert towns like Las Vegas or Phoenix, most days would be considered a massive heat wave day by people living where you live. Warm climate is not and has never been a problem to humans, excepted in the perverted minds of alarmist activists.

First, how responsible are you personally for the benefits and securities of our western culture? Had you or I not been conceived, our cultures would be totally unchanged. We and our neighbors are no more deserving of our good fortune than people born in poor and corrupt countries are deserving of their bad fortune.

Second, because of their poverty and levels of health and lousy or non-existant civic structures, they are in far more jeopardy of suffering than are we. Any implication that we are free from moral obligation to folks in such a situation because they somehow deserve their condition for being born in poverty under corrupt regimes is repugnant.

Third, your response is disingenuous. The problem isn't "heat" and you know that. The problems will be further extremes of drought or rainfall along with coastal flooding plus whatever consequences arise from disruuption of ecosystems. Of course, that is given that the projections are reasonably accurate and I see little cause to consider that the consensus opinions are not to be trusted.

blatham wrote:

"No question this would be a change (always good, says okie) and no question certain positives would eventually become visible, but in the meantime things would get very ugly indeed. Thus the pine beetle example I offered earlier"

So you suppose in old days, way before GW was a problem, there was no infestation ? You're wrong.
BTW, if you want to see large scale disruption due to large and catastrophically rapid temperature rise, just look beetwen the end of this winter and next summer. Will biological systems be shattered ? I don't think so.

Again, a disingenuous response. Creatures and the systems they exist within have evolved to cope with and utilize seasonal change. And yes, ecological systems are always in flux and organisms move in and out of systems. So, would it be just peachy with you if my hypothetical were realized (all BC insects dropped into the ecosystem around your city)? If you are going to address these issues with integrity, you need to explain why that would be either a bad thing or something of no conern at all.

blatham wrote:

I promised a link... it is now up
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19981

this article, which has not much to do with GW but with ethics, development aids which seem to interest you a lot?

Quote:

HOW worried do you reckon people in developing nations -- who are dying from hunger and other causes at the rate of 30,000 a day -- are about global warming? It seems like a stupid question because the answer is so obvious. But the answer is all important. It demonstrates why the supposed No.1 ethical concern of our generation (global warming) is in the main misguided self-interest dressed up as a moral crusade.
Hundreds of millions of people are already living in environmental conditions that are far worse than anything that will occur as a result of greenhouse warming, even according to the grimmest projections by green groups.

And our response? As a nation, we are now obsessed with fussing about speculative future harm while failing to come anywhere close to meeting the international benchmark of donating 0.7 per cent of gross national income to the developing world.

This gross distortion in our ethical priorities is so acute that it can't simply be explained as a judgment problem, something that will be corrected as we become more enlightened. It goes deeper than that.

It highlights the overwhelmingly self-interested nature of the human species, which is exactly the reason, if climate warming projections are right, why we managed to mess up the planet. Scientists, social commentators and politicians are increasingly engaged in the complex process of sifting through the conflicting climate data to ascertain how much environmental degradation will occur in the foreseeable future.

Well, he's right. There are other problems which are more immediate and more acute and we, in the rich countries, have commonly "earned" our wealth through considering the rest of the world as our garden. Self-interest marks our behavior. But it does not follow that therefore global warming ought to be ignored in favor of other considerations.

It is a well-known fact that measures of human or public outrage over perceived dangers bear very little relation to the actual hazard presented. There are many factors beyond the likely reality of the hazard presented that strongly influence human reactions. Dangers unseen and beyond our direct control often are seen as far worse than commonplace but greater hazards over which we have more potential control (though, oddly, don't often exercise it). Comparisons among unseen hazards are themselves almost whimsical in the relative importance to which we attach to them.

Thus, even though by even the most conservative statistical measures, a large traffic intersection poses a much greater expected human hazard to the surrounding population than a nuclear power plant, it is the nuclear powerplant that gets all the attention, while the commonplace, but real, hazards associated with the road intersection go hardly noticed.

There are other factors involved in this phenomenon as well. We all have a very hard time dealing with comparisons between unlikely but horrific events and far more likely but less damaging ones, even in cases in which the (statistically) expected result from the less damaging event is far greater. This has application in the GW debate in that the huge economic cost - and the attendant effect on humanity - of correcting the perceived problem is certain and inescapable, while the supposed problem itself is often defined by very fanciful speculations. Oddly it is the less likely but more horrifying (or exciting) possibility that gets all our attention. This also explains the attractiveness of lotteries, compared to more successful forms of betting (such as blackjack for card counters). Our attention is fixed on the huge prize and not on the miniscule likelihood of winning it.

In a world in which cities are developed in close proximity to volcanoes and geological fault zones; in which temperate zone climate change on a geological time scale is an observable fact of nature; in which the geological record in the magnetic orientation of basaltic rock frozen and pushed outward from upwelling zones shows repeated reversals of the polarity (and strength) of the earth's magnetic field, and in which recent measurements suggest we may be approaching yet another breakdown in the stability of that field - and the attendant protection it provides from cosmic radiation; in which disease, poverty and misgovernance cause so much human suffering -- it is very difficult to understand the contemporary obsession with "global warming", except in terms of these oddities of human behavior.