Finally, some good news

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

marmar (53,972 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore

Climate scientists: It’s basically too late to stop warming

from Grist:

If you like cool weather and not having to club your neighbors as you battle for scarce resources, now’s the time to move to Canada, because the story of the 21st century is almost written, reports Reuters. Global warming is close to being irreversible, and in some cases that ship has already sailed.

Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015 and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do you know: That deadline’s almost past! Crazy how these things sneak up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming is a religion. Also, our science got better in the meantime, so now we know that no matter what we do, we can say adios to the planet’s ice caps.

For ice sheets — huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet — the tipping point has probably already been passed, Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s.

Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take over and, on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The subtropics will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an inhospitable desert, and everyone who lives there will be drinking recycled pee and struggling to salvage something from an economy wrecked by the destruction of agriculture, industry, and electrical power production. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/list/climate-scientists-its-basically-too-late-to-stop-warming/

 
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002478227

Can we finally dispense with this silly carbon tax nonsense?

After all, if it's too late there's no point in paying for all that shit.

We'll just invade Canada. It's not like they have a military and we can save ourselves the hassle of building the Keystone pipeline.

[thundley4]

I'm still waiting for the scientist to explain the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed.

[Toastedturningtidelegs]

Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take over and, on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The subtropics will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an inhospitable desert, and everyone who lives there will be drinking recycled pee and struggling to salvage something from an economy wrecked by the destruction of agriculture, industry, and electrical power production. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/list/climate-scientists-its-basically-too-late-to-stop-warming/  
 
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002478227

Can we finally dispense with this silly carbon tax nonsense?

After all, if it's too late there's no point in paying for all that shit.

We'll just invade Canada. It's not like they have a military and we can save ourselves the hassle of building the Keystone pipeline.

Remember back in the 1970's when all of that "acid rain" fell from the sky obliterating all life on earth?......Yeah that was bad

[DumbAss Tanker]

This is something that would be patently obvious if their starting assumptions about global warming (or cooling, whatever) being man-made were correct.  It would not be rationally possible for an emerging effect of 300 years of cumulative industrialization and population growth to be altered at this late date.  Even if their assumptions were correct, the total cessation of industrial activity would still leave us 'coasting' upward for at least the next fifty years, since the effect lags the cause under their models (Long-term, geological time graphs I have seen indicate that CO2 levels actually lag global temperatures, not the inverse as the rationale of the global warming activists would have it).