Climate change and other predictions of Imminent Doom

[Typhoon]

Quillette | The Bigotry of Environmental Pessimism

It is not surprising that the two manifestos echoed environmentalist ideas. For two centuries, prominent scientists, conservationists, and journalists, have blamed immigrants, the poor, and non-whites for their degradation of the natural environment. Much of what we call “environmentalism” is simply a repackaging of the ideas of 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus. He believed overpopulation of the poor would deplete resources, and that the ethical thing to do was let the poor die of hunger and disease to prevent more hunger and disease in the future. “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits,” he wrote, “and court the return of the plague.” The British government and media used Malthus’ ideas to justify the policies that led to mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1849.

[noddy]

I blame Strayans. There's just too many of them.

The word 'cunt' exudes 0.003% more carbon dioxide than any other monosyllabic utterance a human being can make....'>........

oh contraire, a quick exclamtion of "cunt" saves on the dozens of puffs of breathe required to explain that the other person is "carrying on like a genital and it would be in everyones interest if they chose to desist"

all conversations should be point form and direct, to save the planet from pollution.

[Simple Minded]

all conversations should be point form and direct, to save the planet from pollution.

F**k yeah!

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

I blame Strayans. There's just too many of them.

The word 'cunt' exudes 0.003% more carbon dioxide than any other monosyllabic utterance a human being can make....'>........

oh contraire, a quick exclamtion of "cunt" saves on the dozens of puffs of breathe required to explain that the other person is "carrying on like a genital and it would be in everyones interest if they chose to desist"

all conversations should be point form and direct, to save the planet from pollution.

<<Goes through her catalog of monosyllabic utterances describing various aspects of the female (and where applicable, male) perineum.....>>

I can see where continuing this conversation won't be advantageous to me...........

[noddy]

chode, gooch, taint, all great C02 minimizing stances to take in a multitude of situations.

[Ammianus]

Speaking about the Amazon....

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 3483138055

According to the real "correct" models of climate change, increasingly burning down the Amazon large chunk by chunk per year should have very little to no impact on the global climate. Therefore, the recent brouhaha between the EU and Bolsonaro, and the fiery images of smoke and inferno in Brazil, is but a tempest in a teacup.

[Juno]

Speaking about the Amazon....

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 3483138055

According to the real "correct" models of climate change, increasingly burning down the Amazon large chunk by chunk per year should have very little to no impact on the global climate. Therefore, the recent brouhaha between the EU and Bolsonaro, and the fiery images of smoke and inferno in Brazil, is but a tempest in a teacup.

Turns out most of those fires are farmers clearing their already-cleared land in order to cultivate for the year.

Side note, it seems Obama doesn't put much stock in the rising oceans scam, inasmuch as he's investing $15,000,000 of his hard-earned money in property on Nantucket. Guess it was pure BS all along...

[Typhoon]

Speaking about the Amazon....

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 3483138055

According to the real "correct" models of climate change, increasingly burning down the Amazon large chunk by chunk per year should have very little to no impact on the global climate. Therefore, the recent brouhaha between the EU and Bolsonaro, and the fiery images of smoke and inferno in Brazil, is but a tempest in a teacup.

Turns out most of those fires are farmers clearing their already-cleared land in order to cultivate for the year.

As reported in multiple news sources, this fire season was unremarkable, until mid August. That is when local farmers, in protest against Bolsonaro, declared Dia do fogo (Day of Fire). Hundreds of fires were lit in the following days.

As always, the devil is in the details.

Side note, it seems Obama doesn't put much stock in the rising oceans scam, inasmuch as he's investing $15,000,000 of his hard-earned money in property on Nantucket. Guess it was pure BS all along...

It's always been a case of "do as I say, not as I do".

[Doc]

Speaking about the Amazon....

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 3483138055

According to the real "correct" models of climate change, increasingly burning down the Amazon large chunk by chunk per year should have very little to no impact on the global climate. Therefore, the recent brouhaha between the EU and Bolsonaro, and the fiery images of smoke and inferno in Brazil, is but a tempest in a teacup.

Turns out most of those fires are farmers clearing their already-cleared land in order to cultivate for the year.

As reported in multiple news sources, this fire season was unremarkable, until mid August. That is when local farmers, in protest against Bolsonaro, declared Dia do fogo (Day of Fire). Hundreds of fires were lit in the following days.

As always, the devil is in the details.

Side note, it seems Obama doesn't put much stock in the rising oceans scam, inasmuch as he's investing $15,000,000 of his hard-earned money in property on Nantucket. Guess it was pure BS all along...

It's always been a case of "do as I say, not as I do".

Obama probably just wants to be on the fronts lines of Global Warming.

Even the NYT pointed out the Amazon was having an average year WRT fires:

T6A9PL2zyxQ

[noddy]

.

[Simple Minded]

.

viable posts going extinct, yet another victim of climate change.....

[Doc]

.

viable posts going extinct, yet another victim of climate change.....

Indeed !!! Hopefully Noddy wasn't making a cry for help that was stifled as he was being submerged by climate change induced ocean rise.

[Typhoon]

Times of India | Climate hysteria is a great opportunity to teach children to ask questions

In my view, if anyone tells a child that climate change is man-made just because someone says so (such as a missionary “scientist” but now increasingly, “royals” and “celebrities”), that person has committed a sin against the enlightenment, against human progress.

I would personally have been supportive of Greta Thunberg if she had been a prodigally intelligent child who dazzled her teachers with amazing questions, then found the answers and was now promoting a view that she thoroughly understood. It would not matter to me that she had come to the wrong conclusion. After all, no one can be right on everything all the time. But she suffers, sadly, from mental issues and speaks as a missionary – she cannot answer a single question about the science.

We are very prone as a species to superstitions, panics, delusions, manias and hysterias. We have gone through thousands of them (many still underway), such as religion, alchemy, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, the Y2K bug, the SARS panic, much of Ayurveda and Chinese traditional medicine and all of homeopathy.

The climate hysteria will ultimately pass, but to avoid such hysterias in the future we need to get our children to start thinking and stop believing. Climate change is a superb topic for teachers and students to explore.

[Simple Minded]

Indeed !!! Hopefully Noddy wasn't making a cry for help that was stifled as he was being submerged by climate change induced ocean rise.

I'm hoping that with the ocean temps rising so rapidly, a Great White Shark, or even an Oppressed Shark of Color did not evolve and develop land legs and ate him.

[noddy]

I had an unfocused rant on trees and cows being included in global warming now when they are only temporary carbon stores of carbon already in the atmospheric cycle.

It was badly written and I couldnt be arsed rewriting it clearly so deleted it.

If you did believe in that theory, then the bit thats relevant is the new carbon being added to the system, not so much the comings and goings of the carbon already in the system - which at best is an unreliable buffer.

[Simple Minded]

I had an unfocused rant on trees and cows being included in global warming now when they are only temporary carbon stores of carbon already in the atmospheric cycle.

It was badly written and I couldnt be arsed rewriting it clearly so deleted it.

If you did believe in that theory, then the bit thats relevant is the new carbon being added to the system, not so much the comings and goings of the carbon already in the system - which at best is an unreliable buffer.

Thank a deity of your choosing that you are still alive... unless of course the land shark absorbed your intelligence after eating you...... probably not a good phase of evolution.

the latest conspiracy theory I have heard. The Russians (THEM AGAIN?!?!) are setting fire to Siberia to increase the temperature in the Arctic to melt the ice to create a new shipping lane.

AGW is a stubborn religion that just will not die.

https://www.groundzeromedia.org/8-26-19 ... greenland/

[Doc]

Indeed !!! Hopefully Noddy wasn't making a cry for help that was stifled as he was being submerged by climate change induced ocean rise.

I'm hoping that with the ocean temps rising so rapidly, a Great White Shark, or even an Oppressed Shark of Color did not evolve and develop land legs and ate him.

Or even worse a great white sharknado in the guise of snakes wrapped in planes wrapped in global climate conferences wrapped in global climate models.

[Doc]

I had an unfocused rant on trees and cows being included in global warming now when they are only temporary carbon stores of carbon already in the atmospheric cycle.

It was badly written and I couldnt be arsed rewriting it clearly so deleted it.

If you did believe in that theory, then the bit thats relevant is the new carbon being added to the system, not so much the comings and goings of the carbon already in the system - which at best is an unreliable buffer.

Thank a deity of your choosing that you are still alive... unless of course the land shark absorbed your intelligence after eating you...... probably not a good phase of evolution.

the latest conspiracy theory I have heard. The Russians (THEM AGAIN?!?!) are setting fire to Siberia to increase the temperature in the Arctic to melt the ice to create a new shipping lane.

AGW is a stubborn religion that just will not die.

https://www.groundzeromedia.org/8-26-19 ... greenland/

I heard that land sharks don't like the taste of Ozzies. It is said that they taste too much like chicken.

[Doc]

[Typhoon]

Forbes - Shellenberger | Why Everything 'They' Say About The Amazon, Including That It's The 'Lungs Of The World,' Is Wrong

One of Brazil’s leading environmental journalists agrees that media coverage of the fires has been misleading. “It was under [Workers Party President] Lula and [Environment Secretary] Marina Silva (2003-2008) that Brazil had the highest incidence of burning,” Leonardo Coutinho told me over email. “But neither Lula nor Marina was accused of putting the Amazon at risk.”

Coutinho’s perspective was shaped by reporting on the ground in the Amazon for Veja, Brazil’s leading news magazine, for nearly a decade. By contrast, many of the correspondents reporting on the fires have been doing so from the cosmopolitan cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which are 2,500 miles and four hours by jet plane away.

As an aside, an estimated 50 to 85 percent of the planet's oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the ocean.

[Ammianus]

Frightening calculation on how the Amazon, once deforested enough, can enter into a negative feedback cycle that destroys itself and transforms into a far less efficient and less biodiverse savannah:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/worl ... imate.html

Before Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil and oversaw this summer’s drastic increase in man-made fires in the Amazon rainforest, Dr. Balch and her colleagues set out to study what was then a rarer phenomenon.
They subjected plots of rainforest to a decade of small but repeated fires like those set by farmers, and they found something alarming. After enough cycles, even if the fires caused only moderate damage, if rainfall dropped, the trees began dying off in huge numbers.
The proportion of plant life that died after a fire suddenly spiked from 5 or 10 percent to 60 percent — sudden ecological death.

“We were able to document that, yes, the Amazon does have a tipping point,” Dr. Balch said of her team’s experiment, which is still going on. “And it can happen in a very short period of time.”
But what most disturbed the scientists was how this phenomenon seemed to fit into a larger cycle — one that implicated the rainforest as a whole.
That cycle is triggered by four forces, all but one of them man-made: roads, fires, invasive grasses and climate change.
Roads, along with other forms of construction, fragment the rainforest, leaving each acre of plant life less able to endure a fire or resist its spread.
“As fragmentation is happening, you’re exposing a lot more forest edges,” Dr. Balch said. Those edges are more susceptible to drying out and other dangers.
Invasive grasses are one of those dangers, lingering at forest edges. Even a small fire can wipe out a rainforest’s undergrowth. Then grasses rush in, setting a blanket of dry, flammable plant life — and making the next fire far more damaging.
Climate change, by heating the Amazon, has made its dry seasons dryer and more hospitable to those grasses. As fires clear undergrowth, they carve out new, vulnerable forest edges and dry out forests, exacerbating the effects of climate change.
But what makes those forces so dangerous is not that they kill trees — it’s that they reduce rainfall.
In a healthy rainforest, plant life absorbs rainwater and groundwater, then sweats it back out into the atmosphere as moisture, seeding more rain. But once a section of rainforest has been thinned and fragmented, it gives off less moisture. Rainfall decreases, and the ground, of course, grows drier.
As a result, the next fire burns hotter and reaches deeper, causing more damage. Past a certain point, the forest no longer produces enough rain to survive.
“There’s already evidence that this can take place on phenomenal scales,” said Daniel Nepstad, an environmental scientist who studies the Amazon. “This is the imminent risk that could overshadow deforestation as a risk to this forest.”
Dieback occurs when each of these elements — fires, invasive grasses, reduced rainfall — trigger a chain reaction, acting like the components of a combustion engine.
That cycle is supercharged at every stage by climate change. That means the sudden death that Dr. Balch’s team observed in a few isolated plots could play out across the rainforest as a whole.
Repeated studies have found that deforestation leads to reductions in rainfall — and can even extend the annual dry season by a full month. There are already indications that Amazon deforestation will lead to catastrophic reductions in rainfall.

As the warning signs of large-scale dieback have mounted, more scientists have come to see that scenario as a threat not just to the Amazon’s inhabitants and Brazil’s economy, but to a world already struggling to confront climate change.
“It’s a lot of carbon,” Dr. Lovejoy said. “It’s a really big number.”
And it’s not just the Amazon.
“This is a global phenomenon,” said Dr. Balch, who has studied grasslands in the United States that could pose a similar threat. Dr. Nepstad said that he had found warning signs in the rainforests of Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dr. Lovejoy compared this moment to the years before the onset of the Dust Bowl, in which mismanagement and drought turned American plains states into wastelands during the 1930s.
“Nobody really saw that coming,” he said. “The difference between then and now is we do see it coming and we know enough not to do it.”

I am reminded of a stark fact that climate change "skeptics" are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon, without considering the possibility that on a macro scale, something like the Dust Bowl can happen again.

[Doc]

Frightening calculation on how the Amazon, once deforested enough, can enter into a negative feedback cycle that destroys itself and transforms into a far less efficient and less biodiverse savannah:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/worl ... imate.html

Before Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil and oversaw this summer’s drastic increase in man-made fires in the Amazon rainforest, Dr. Balch and her colleagues set out to study what was then a rarer phenomenon.
They subjected plots of rainforest to a decade of small but repeated fires like those set by farmers, and they found something alarming. After enough cycles, even if the fires caused only moderate damage, if rainfall dropped, the trees began dying off in huge numbers.
The proportion of plant life that died after a fire suddenly spiked from 5 or 10 percent to 60 percent — sudden ecological death.

“We were able to document that, yes, the Amazon does have a tipping point,” Dr. Balch said of her team’s experiment, which is still going on. “And it can happen in a very short period of time.”
But what most disturbed the scientists was how this phenomenon seemed to fit into a larger cycle — one that implicated the rainforest as a whole.
That cycle is triggered by four forces, all but one of them man-made: roads, fires, invasive grasses and climate change.
Roads, along with other forms of construction, fragment the rainforest, leaving each acre of plant life less able to endure a fire or resist its spread.
“As fragmentation is happening, you’re exposing a lot more forest edges,” Dr. Balch said. Those edges are more susceptible to drying out and other dangers.
Invasive grasses are one of those dangers, lingering at forest edges. Even a small fire can wipe out a rainforest’s undergrowth. Then grasses rush in, setting a blanket of dry, flammable plant life — and making the next fire far more damaging.
Climate change, by heating the Amazon, has made its dry seasons dryer and more hospitable to those grasses. As fires clear undergrowth, they carve out new, vulnerable forest edges and dry out forests, exacerbating the effects of climate change.
But what makes those forces so dangerous is not that they kill trees — it’s that they reduce rainfall.
In a healthy rainforest, plant life absorbs rainwater and groundwater, then sweats it back out into the atmosphere as moisture, seeding more rain. But once a section of rainforest has been thinned and fragmented, it gives off less moisture. Rainfall decreases, and the ground, of course, grows drier.
As a result, the next fire burns hotter and reaches deeper, causing more damage. Past a certain point, the forest no longer produces enough rain to survive.
“There’s already evidence that this can take place on phenomenal scales,” said Daniel Nepstad, an environmental scientist who studies the Amazon. “This is the imminent risk that could overshadow deforestation as a risk to this forest.”
Dieback occurs when each of these elements — fires, invasive grasses, reduced rainfall — trigger a chain reaction, acting like the components of a combustion engine.
That cycle is supercharged at every stage by climate change. That means the sudden death that Dr. Balch’s team observed in a few isolated plots could play out across the rainforest as a whole.
Repeated studies have found that deforestation leads to reductions in rainfall — and can even extend the annual dry season by a full month. There are already indications that Amazon deforestation will lead to catastrophic reductions in rainfall.

As the warning signs of large-scale dieback have mounted, more scientists have come to see that scenario as a threat not just to the Amazon’s inhabitants and Brazil’s economy, but to a world already struggling to confront climate change.
“It’s a lot of carbon,” Dr. Lovejoy said. “It’s a really big number.”
And it’s not just the Amazon.
“This is a global phenomenon,” said Dr. Balch, who has studied grasslands in the United States that could pose a similar threat. Dr. Nepstad said that he had found warning signs in the rainforests of Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dr. Lovejoy compared this moment to the years before the onset of the Dust Bowl, in which mismanagement and drought turned American plains states into wastelands during the 1930s.
“Nobody really saw that coming,” he said. “The difference between then and now is we do see it coming and we know enough not to do it.”

I am reminded of a stark fact that climate change "skeptics" are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon, without considering the possibility that on a macro scale, something like the Dust Bowl can happen again.

FACT: The Amazon has a huge diversity because it the past it was broken into several forests where species diverged from each other.. What has happened in the past can and will happen in the future.

[Typhoon]

Frightening calculation on how the Amazon, once deforested enough, can enter into a negative feedback cycle that destroys itself and transforms into a far less efficient and less biodiverse savannah:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/worl ... imate.html

Before Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil and oversaw this summer’s drastic increase in man-made fires in the Amazon rainforest, Dr. Balch and her colleagues set out to study what was then a rarer phenomenon.
They subjected plots of rainforest to a decade of small but repeated fires like those set by farmers, and they found something alarming. After enough cycles, even if the fires caused only moderate damage, if rainfall dropped, the trees began dying off in huge numbers.
The proportion of plant life that died after a fire suddenly spiked from 5 or 10 percent to 60 percent — sudden ecological death.


. . .

I am reminded of a stark fact that climate change "skeptics" are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon, without considering the possibility that on a macro scale, something like the Dust Bowl can happen again.

Strawman argument. I am not aware of any climate change skeptics who "are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon".

I am reminded that the NY Times, the American leader of the once mainstream media, now publishes a load of bollocks that would make Bat Boy blush.



This incident is a good example of condescending neo-colonialism by the chattering classes of the West.

Also

[Simple Minded]

Frightening calculation on how the Amazon, once deforested enough, can enter into a negative feedback cycle that destroys itself and transforms into a far less efficient and less biodiverse savannah:

..........
I am reminded of a stark fact that climate change "skeptics" are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon, without considering the possibility that on a macro scale, something like the Dust Bowl can happen again.

FACT: The Amazon has a huge diversity because it the past it was broken into several forests where species diverged from each other.. What has happened in the past can and will happen in the future.

Belonging to the church of Doomer Porn is an act of true faith given how often "the experts/scientists" have been wrong in the past. Doomer Porners are like people waiting at a train station. After they miss the current train to Armageddon, there will be another train coming down the tracks shortly.

Doc, Except for the end of the world. That can't happen again. At least until it happens the first time.

[Doc]

Frightening calculation on how the Amazon, once deforested enough, can enter into a negative feedback cycle that destroys itself and transforms into a far less efficient and less biodiverse savannah:

..........
I am reminded of a stark fact that climate change "skeptics" are fond of pooh poohing about the negative effects of deforesting the Amazon, without considering the possibility that on a macro scale, something like the Dust Bowl can happen again.

FACT: The Amazon has a huge diversity because it the past it was broken into several forests where species diverged from each other.. What has happened in the past can and will happen in the future.

Belonging to the church of Doomer Porn is an act of true faith given how often "the experts/scientists" have been wrong in the past. Doomer Porners are like people waiting at a train station. After they miss the current train to Armageddon, there will be another train coming down the tracks shortly.

Doc, Except for the end of the world. That can't happen again. At least until it happens the first time.

The other thing I failed to mention is that cold air is dry on a macro scale. IE the atmosphere around the poles is the driest on earth, and they are covered by H2O dust.