pouët.net

Well, lets have a look at Russia....Capitalism done right! :D

PS: I'd like to see more carebear porn!

well perhaps not. but i'm not giving them any credit, they still work for the IPCC/UN. and like you said, from watching that debate, it was clear that there is no absolute consensus (far from it). i understand it may not be a black & white clear cut situation, i'm not a belligerent fool. but when I see our govs and NGOs jumping on less than certain "evidence" of scientists and using it all as an excuse to tax and control; it becomes a choice between just "taking a risk" or allowing crooks to use the whole uncertain situation to further their own agendas (and if nothing else, im pretty certain i know what that is).

I mean, they've now got the general public (psonice + crapbob,etc) to the stage where they're even considering the validity of draconian "population control" and carbon rationing. yet in that very video one of the scientists points to merely growing as much forestry as possible. amazing. i'm all for cleaning up, but when they want to kill me - NO!

definitely a catch-22, and there's nothing govs like more than putting us in a situation where you feel you have no choice but to just go along. i actually feel sorry for scientists having to deal with political worms on this issue.

rtype: nowhere have I said I'm in favour of population control. I said population should be kept to within what the earth could support - I think this is common sense, because beyond that point the earth starts limiting population by starving people. Nowhere have I said what limit this is, or that we should consider doing it now - you brought that up.

And where did I even mention carbon rationing?! Nowhere. You made that up. Want to tell me why?

i was talking in general terms about people's graduated acceptance of these measures over time. i know it's hard if people do not point things out to you directly, but that was the jest of what i was saying. i guess it'll only take another Northern flooding (which we've been having forever) to begin considering carbon rationing.

just don't forget, China have been "limiting" their population before they even knew what GW was. And it certainly had nothing to do with ecological sustainability.

*jest = gist

i wasnt trying to be funny - believe it or not :)

limiting population sounds like a great plan, let's get rid of all those obviously redundant climatedebaters first :)

;)

master piece !!

Rtype. I have to agree that I too are pro some kind of limiter on the populations. So on this point I share Psonices views. It seems that wealth is the best solution. The more wealthy a nation becomes the less children it produces. Of course this is a sweeping generalization, but there is something to it. In Denmark it holds true that the better educated or smart a person are, the less likely they are to reproduce wildly. I think the magic number the state is looking for is 2.3 or so child per family. To keep population level at what it is. educated people who earn fair amounts of money have in the general area of 2 where the lesser fortunate and those who are lazy makes up for the rest.

On the panel debate. I got the impression that only 2 of them worked directly with the IPCC? Richard Lindzen was highly sceptical of the whole thing. Stephen Ansolabehere was sceptical of the way the science was handled by the politicians and the media, but not so much of the science itself. Ronald G. Prinn SCD '71 (IPCC scientist) admitted that it was fear that made him interpret the data like he did, and that the only really dividing factor between those pro and con AGW was in their ability to handle uncertainty. From the questions from the audience i got the impression that there is a split right down the middle.

I still have not figured out the exact nature of what is really going on, there is too much static for that. But I do have my suspicions. The whole thing is becoming more and more fishy on the COP15 meet. The casual blending of all the individual issues into a foul concoction of information and issues has only served to create even greater confusion. But I think it is safe to assume that the science by and large are solid and that where it runs off-course is in the interpretation department. And where it turns into outright lunacy is in the political department.

But how should the Earth's population be kept within those limits without control? We've not generally had population control so far, and the population has been growing exponentially. What's going to change without some form of control?



It's not a point as much as it's a gradient. Here's what to expect. What flattens the curve on the right hand side are environmental pressures: lack of space and resources, competition between individuals and so on.

And it's not that we'll gently ease into some comfortable equilibrium; it's actually going to be very violent and very horrible. And it's not a singular event, either; it's a nightmare that will go on forever and ever until something changes. That change might be the invention of new genetically modified crops that yield 50% more food, say, but that only shifts that horrible equilibrium somewhat and gives us a period of less misery until the population size catches up. Cause, humans like to make babies. It's our sole purpose, as far as all the hard-wired behaviour is concerned.

Currently, the generally accepted figures say that at least 25,000 people starve to death every day. That's not counting all the diseases we're too busy to treat, all the wars we don't care about, and so on. That would bring the figure up to 70,000. So no, the Earth limiting the human population isn't something to expect "at some point". It started a long time ago, and all we can expect for the future is that it's gradually going to get worse.

And it means fuck all in that context whether the Earth heats up by 2, 4 or 6 degrees in the meantime. On a completely unrelated note, I was watching climate debates on the telly all morning. It made me sick.

were we looking at the same thing? looked more like preaching to me.

Also, this thread looks to me like the most quickly developing thread of pouet? Interesting.

Doom: I don't know that we've hit the point where there's more people than the earth can support yet. I think most of the people starving is down to money or poor government - I mean if there's not enough food for everyone, how come there's so many fat people?

We've long since passed a lot of these 'the earth can only support x people' barriers - if everyone was still a hunter gatherer, we'd only have perhaps a few million, with organic farming maybe a billion or two? I'm sure we'll figure out how to extract even more, and then there's the option of growing stuff in tanks, or recycling (hello soylent green :)

There's various ways to limit population too - the chinese way, or the japanese way (like iblis said, well educated people tend to make less babies). There's probably tons more.

Anyway, quick summary of the copenhagen summit, in the style of dr. seuss:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_RlKxz_ymQ

So, Copenhagen apparently was one big fail. (the saudis want reparations in case they export less oil. wat.)

However, I just read that Dennis Snower suggested to introduce a CO2 tax that should help "less fortunate" countries to make their industries more eco-friendly.
Good idea but this tax should only be applied to the industry, and thus only be paid indirectly by the citizens. (let the individuals choose which products they buy. these products will surely get more expensive to account for the tax. that's a good thing, IMHO)

Please try to understand that there is a difference between:

a) "human-caused global warming isn't dangerous"
b) "human-caused global warming isn't real".

The sentence "a" could very well be true for all I know. The sentence "b" is obviously really false.

I don't know the exact extent that human caused emissions are dangerous. There are people making estimations. Some people are underestimating and other people are overestimating, I think. It's very hard to tell who is right. Even if I did my own measurements and research, it could be at odds with other people's conclusions depending on what aspect I decided to study (e.g. ocean temperature patterns, ice cap extents, ice core samples).

But global warming is real:

a) Human and their factories/machines emit greenhouse gases.
b) Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause global warming.

If either of these two facts turned out to be incorrect, it would be a huge change in our understanding of science.

How much do we emit? We don't actually need to do measurements of the atmosphere. In fact, these measurements are not likely to result in any kind of measurement of human-caused emissions, because of all the other things on Earth adding and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. But we can, in controlled conditions, measure the amount of CO2 emitted by each type of car (or even just calculate what it must be, looking at how the car works), and use census-style reports to estimate the amount of cars—and do similar studies with factories, power plants, airplanes, whatever else causes greenhouse gas emissions. Or we can look at total fossil fuel production and sales and assume that it all gets burned (or estimate how much gets wasted, and assume the rest is burned).

One estimate of the amount of emissions we are doing is this:


from wikipedia.

This is an amount of carbon emissions per year, not CO2. I don't know exactly how to convert it to the mass of resulting CO2, but I guess one would multiply by 44/12, assuming each of those carbon atoms bonded with O2 (I don't know if that's a reasonable assumption, but this is just a rough estimate.) So we've got 29 gigatonnes of CO2/year by this, or just 8 if I made a mistake in multiplying by 44/12.

There is currently 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (wikipedia). We are adding either 29 gigatonnes or 8 gigatonnes per year. So that's either 3% or 1%, roughly, per year.

Of course, a lot of this CO2 is reabsorbed, because the absorption rate of CO2 is proportional to the amount that exists in the atmosphere. However, not 100% of the CO2 is absorbed, or else there would be no CO2 in the atmosphere at all. There is some equilibrium, and adding CO2 will always increase that equilibrium by some amount. How much does it increase the equilibrium by? I have no clue. It's incredibly hard to calculate, and I wouldn't trust any measurement unless a lot of different research teams came to roughly the same answer.

The big problem with CO2 emissions (and most other pollutants) is that they're cumulative. If human-caused global warming isn't a problem this year, in 2009, if it hasn't already happened to the point of catastrophe, that doesn't mean that it never will. In fact, it's pretty much inevitable, as we just add more CO2, year after year after year, and even increase the rate of emissions and increase them and increase them and increase them. I don't know when it will amount to something dangerous. It could be 200 years or 2000 years. But your argument is to look and see if dangerous human-caused global warming has already happened by looking at ice core samples and things like that. We already know, and everyone agrees, that dangerous human-caused global warming hasn't already happened. The problem of human-caused global warming is a problem of what will happen, and trying to answer the question "when", and "how can we increase the amount of time before it happens".

The thing that's very very very confusing to most people is that the amount of human-caused global warming that has already happened is fairly small, and it looks insignificant compared to natural changes in CO2 and temperature. This for some reason tricks people into concluding that the entire concept of human-caused global warming is completely fictitious. But this conclusion assumes that we are somehow done with emissions, and that emissions aren't just increasing and increasing. The big problem with human-caused global warming is what's going to happen. Not what has already happened. So the entire argument against human-caused global warming, which is to look at historic records of CO2 and historic records of temperature, to see whether or not the amount of human-caused global warming that has already happened is dangerous, is completely irrelevant.

THAT is my problem with the premise of this thread, and this entire "climategate" thing.

The last couple of months I been coding climate model for Bjørn Lomborg. It has been a somewhat challenging project, but now my numbers finally matches theirs. The amounts of money that are used in these computations are in the 0..250 billion USD range!! I unfortunately couldn't finish it on time, so they lost an opportunity to affect the decision makers at COP15. It gives you some idea about how atmospheric temperature and sea level rise behaves under various conditions. Very interesting to be a part of.

neoneye- Great! Could you give us an executive summary of your conclusions?

yasso: yes yes, i understand the pseudo scientific logic-prison which they have constructed for us and which they hope will lead us all to the same conclusion: "we have no choice but to save the earth!!! PANIC!!" Very clever and cunning, i'm sure. isn't "education" a great thing when you can show an entire nation of people a graph and have them all arrive at the same conclusion, despite what's in front of their eyes.

but I have just spent some time reading the outcome of Cop15



"earmarked for climate adaptation" - that has no meaning in the context of halting supposedly exponential risk caused by human emissions. no legally binding legislation, no CO2 targets set, no agreements - no nothing. Just lots and lots of our money being shipped off to the UN to enable them to lay the foundations of their new global government and feed their fat friends. Oh, and "help the poor Africans" (tm), mustn't forget that old line - must we!

i stand by my word...nothing but yet another scam.

yesso: climatologist have different models, the DICE model predicts that atmospheric temperature will rise by 3 celcius over the next 100 years, and sea level will go up by 60 centi meters. Unless something is done. I believe the DICE model has the strongest following among scientists.

Probably. It was a whole lot of preaching, and a whole lot of politicians calling this the most important issue facing the world today. And of course they falsely presented the scientific consensus on man-made global warming as a scientific consensus that global warming should be made a priority. Meanwhile leftist nutjobs were ranting and raving that politicians failed to do enough, that the agreement reached was watered down and didn't take drastic enough measures, again without any reason for the assumption that global warming should be a priority at all.

I even heard this gem (paraphrasing): "It's clear that global warming is man-made, and what humans have caused, humans should do something about." There you go. Not quite elegant enough to be a circular argument, but every bit as dumb. And these people rule the world. Makes you think, doesn't it?

The only cost-benefit analysis that's been done says global warming will probably cause us some grief in the future, but it's not really a doomsday scenario, and even with the huge amounts of money we're looking to throw at solving the problem, that will at most make a tiny impact, whereas if it was spent on things like mosquito nets, malaria vaccines and dietary supplements, we could start saving countless millions of lives straight away AND work towards a sustainable future where the third world actually contributes to the global economy and important environmental changes, to everyone's benefit, instead of being abused for the personal gain of the corporate elite.

But nobody seems to have any cost-benefit analysis that challenges the Copenhagen Consensus. There weren't even criticisms of it. The whole issue was just completely ignored, I guess because the last thing we need is a rational approach to this supposedly huge problem. After all, it sounds so cynical to say, "one life 50 years from now matters less than a thousand lives today". And it is. But saying the opposite is stupid and/or evil. So best just ignore it completely. Yay democracy.

iq: Like communism, voluntary population control might work in theory, but first you have to get everyone on board. Even in the west where making as many babies as possible is not a way of securing your family's future (like it is in much of the third world), people still come up with excuses for making babies, even despite all the existing babies still looking for a home. I really doubt you can stop the trend just by giving away more free condoms.



Food isn't distributed evenly enough, sure. And meats are an order of magnitude less efficient than veggie foods. And there are more efficient crops on the horizon, and we can do away with farming altogether maybe. And so on. But that doesn't change the nature of exponential growth. All it does is increase the maximum number of people the Earth can sustain, which accelerates population growth, until we're nearing the equilibrium again. Exponential growth is never sustainable. Not ever. Visualise!

Or imagine this: It's 2050 and the Earth has 10 billion humans. With unlimited resources the uncontrolled birth/natural-death ratio means the number would double every 50 years. But the population is stable at 10 billion. That means a 1.3% growth every year is suppressed by environmental factors, or more simply put, 130 million people starve to death every year.

Now some brilliant scientist invents a new type of food that means Earth can support 20 billion humans. It's put to work straight away, and those 1.3% no longer die. But then 50 years pass, we reach 20 billion, and now the 1.3% is 260 million people who starve to death every year. So all this brilliant scientist did was delay and intensify the problem.

Then politicians finally get together and construct a perfect system for sharing all resources equally, and then the Earth supports 40 billion people. But then 50 years pass and, before you know it, the population is stable at 40 billion and there's 520 million deaths from starvation every year.

And keep in mind those are imaginary advances in agriculture and politics, pretty far-fetched and extremely optimistic. There is no way to keep up with exponential growth for any reasonable amount of time. It just can't be done. In reality the curves would look smoother, more like logistic growth curves, but there would none the less be this exponential growth towards a ceiling, and pushing the ceiling upwards only makes matters worse, like drinking alcohol to stay warm. The only option we have is to try to change the exponential nature of human population growth.

yes and more so it makes me kinda worried as technology has made it even easier for a puppet tyrant or tyranny in spe, to live out their wettest dreams. We are in complete agreement on this AGW issue, so you are preaching to the choir mate. COP15 was a disgrace for the very reasons you offer up -and I'm certain- plenty more yet to be understood in times to come.