UN Report on Global Warming

Let There Be Dark, Or At Least Fewer Watts

Richard T. Stuebi, Cleantech Blog, Feb. 5 2007

Last week, as virtually everyone with an interest in energy and the environment knows, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathered in Paris to release the first report of their Fourth Assessment. (see article) The report presents the accumulated evidence of physical change that has already occurred in the climate, and what is expected to or might occur by the end of the 21st Century. If someone were to read this report and continue thinking that climate change is a hoax, then that person is either unable to read or unable to think. ...

Comments

[C K]

I don't think the issue is acknowledging climate change... it's about determining our effect on it.

Is that what you meant?

[Paul Dietz]

C K: he meant anthropogenic climate change. Clinging to the notion that the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that humans are releasing is not causing the current warming is becoming increasingly kooky and irrational.

[Janis Mara]

I loved the headline, "Let there be dark." Let a thousand compact flourescents bloom!

[Rick]

Do we know if Global cooling is desirable or even maintaining Global temp is for the best? (if that were possible)

Storms, growing seasons and food supply, sea levels and every other affect of global temperature adjustment involves much speculation.

Scientists are wrong a lot about how things will go in the future.

For all we know a warmer earth will be better in the overall scheme of things.

But we don't know. That is the point.

[George]

rick wrote: For all we know a warmer earth will be better in the overall scheme of things.

But we don't know. That is the point.

So are you suggesting we run the experiment and find out?

[Rick]

I guess the experiment is on.

I look at it this way. Imagine an ice free world where Antartica is populated and producing crops etc. Imagine that place starts to experience a drop in green house gasses(maybe everybody uses solar power or something), a cooling trend is the result and scientist warn of poles freezing over. People freezing to death, animal extinctions etc.

I'm not convinced frozen poles are a good thing. I think the planet may be too cold.

[jlw]

The likelihood is that the net change in land area in a world where Antarctica is ice free will be negative--we'd lose more acreage from sea level rise than we'd gain in Antarctica and Greenland. What's more, this new land would be marginally productive at best, with strange growing seasons affected by very dark winters and barren, rocky soil lacking in organic material. The lost land in Florida, Asia and elsewhere, however, is incredibly productive.

I say we try to restore things close to the status quo ante; if we need to warm up the planet sometime in the future (after some cosmological disaster) we now know how.