faetal on 12/3/2015 at 15:13
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
It doesn't matter if nature will adept in a way that Faetal likes or doesn't like.
What on earth was the point of this? I'm talking about what will affect the survival of the majority of earth's living systems. Pretty sure my personal preferences never came into it.
Gryzemuis on 12/3/2015 at 15:37
Quote Posted by faetal
What on earth was the point of this?
OK, I should not have worded it that way. :)
But the question remains. Why do we care so much about some species, and not about others. People like this world, with whales, panda-bears, baby seals adn other fluffy animals. What if we had a world with mainly cockroaches and other insects, maybe some rodents, and no humans. Would that be worse ? Would that not be nature too ? Is the world useless and ugly today, because we don't have any dinosaurs walking around ?
Inline Image:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/03/11/26896C9F00000578-2988412-image-a-21_1426076674505.jpgPyrian on 12/3/2015 at 16:05
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
But the question remains.
The question of "why should we do something about a problem that consists almost entirely of the fact that we're not doing enough about it"?
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
Why do we care so much about some species, and not about others.
Oh, a different silly question. But why
wouldn't we? For any perspective short of total nihilism, the differences between species are incredibly important.
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
People like this world, with whales, panda-bears, baby seals adn other fluffy animals. What if we had a world with mainly cockroaches and other insects, maybe some rodents, and no humans. Would that be worse ?
It would certainly be worse for humans, which is an important distinction to us given that we
are humans. It would also lose a tremendous amount of biodiversity, much of which would never recover, and the rest would take an extremely long time. And it's not like the Earth will habitable forever.
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
Would that not be nature too ?
Venus is natural, but I wouldn't want to live there (however briefly, lol).
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
Is the world useless and ugly today, because we don't have any dinosaurs walking around ?
At least we got birds out of the bargain.
Medlar on 12/3/2015 at 16:36
According to James Delingpole over at the Spectator, Top Gear is 'the only programme on BBC television that doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming.'
Now, we're all familiar with Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson's penchant for hippy baiting, but is this latest claim true? Not in the slightest, according to Clarkson himself.
Clarkson, as any avid Times reader will know, does believe that burning fossil fuels warms the world. It's just that he doesn't see the need to freak out about it.
'Global warming's coming', wrote Clarkson in 2007, 'so you can don your King Canute hat and stand on the beach waving your Toyota Prius at the advancing heatwave, but it won't make a ha'p'orth of difference.'
'Unless we stop thinking of ways to prevent global warming', Clarkson argues, 'and start to address the problems it will cause when it gets here, our children are going to finish their days in an overcrowded, superheated vision of hell.'
heywood on 12/3/2015 at 20:43
BBC are a bunch of hypocrites for producing and airing the racist jokes for years and then throwing Clarkson under the bus and threatening his job when the media regulator came down on them. That said, if he did punch a coworker he deserves to be suspended or fired.
I feel like Top Gear has run its course anyway. I've seen enough supercars, enough celeb drivers, and enough of that airstrip track. Getting tired of the buddy road trip episodes too. It used to be one of my favorite shows, but the format is becoming stale. My wife and I still sit down occasionally with a couple beers and replay some of the classic adventures and absurd challenges, but I don't watch the new episodes much any longer.
Muzman on 12/3/2015 at 21:34
Quote Posted by Medlar
According to James Delingpole over at the Spectator, Top Gear is 'the only programme on BBC television that doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming.'
Well Delingpole never met a nuance he couldn't magnify to support his stupid arguments.
Clarkson is a mixed sort of character, it's true. But when your schtick is shoveling ranty old man fare and sticking to the 'PC Left' and their minority friends or whoever every week, to such fame and fortune, it gets like professional wrestling. You can't watch people's really passionate enthusiasm for it without becoming very worried that they don't know it's somewhat phony.
Anyway
Quote Posted by Thor
About global warming, I think it's just a climate cycle. We had an ice age thousands of years ago, but the temperature's been going up ever since. It still hasn't reached the peak before it starts to cool down into another ice age. A little approximate, but I think human influence isn't
that big.
Let's see if I can remember this; Temperature shifts in the past have lined up nicely with orbital changes and patterns of solar irradiance. Now they don't. Temps have been going up when they should have been going down.
Previously temperatures went up before triggering the release of CO2 which then amplified the effect. Now CO2 levels and temperature rise are correlated.
While distant past information wasn't gathered with precise measurements like today, the global temperature average has been going up with pretty alarming speed. With that CO2 correlation it looks bad.
Atmospheric CO2 levels have doubled in the last hundred years and continue to rise. This is very unusual. And we can tell from the carbon isotopes that these additional amounts have been put there by us burning stuff.
Based on all the information we have, it's not just the planetary climate cycle. Human activity is causing temperatures to rise quite quickly.
faetal on 13/3/2015 at 09:49
Clarkson isn't qualified to say how we should or shouldn't behave with respect to global warming. He seems to think that we can deal with it when it gets here. He's given up on the notion of trying to avert disastrous further change and is espousing this via his news columns straight into the faces of people looking for talking points to parrot when trying to justify why they didn't factor fuel efficiency into their car choice or whatever. Obviously these people would still hold their views regardless, but a celebrity acting as an amplification factor for ignorant views which may assist in destroying or decimating our species doesn't get any awards ceremony from me.
The leading hypothesis behind the Permian mass extinction is that a 5 degree change in average global temperature led to increased release of methane from clathrate stores under the oceans. This methane release led to a further rise of approx 5 degrees which kicked so many species out of synch with each other, that the vast majority of life on earth was wiped out. This took place over approx 200,000 years and we've created around 10% of that change in just 200 years and the rate at which it is happening is getting faster.
Methane clathrate isn't the only runaway effect either. You have the loss of ice which reduces the earth's albedo, meaning that less sunlight is reflected back into space, meaning that more heat is generated within the atmosphere, leading to faster ice loss etc... -positive feedback. Arctic tundra permafrost thaw is releasing methane. CO2 dissolving into water and lowering the pH is increasing the dissolution rate of the silicate shells of coccolithophores, which releases (if I remember correctly) sulphur dioxide, another greenhouse gas. The list of things which can take the control away from us goes on. But Clarkson loves big cars, so... can't be true, or can't be helped, or whatever lets us keep going on like normal.
The reason some species are more important than others in the context of sustaining our species, is that we can't eat everything and we can't sustain our own ecological conditions. Just because we chuck a few buildings up and design smart phones, it doesn't mean that we are fully in control of our environment. If species with a limited tolerance of climate change die off, the ones with a higher tolerance become favoured and rapidly out-compete the more fragile species. So-called "weedy" species (based on plant weeds), the opportunists will reign. There's no guarantee that will include things we depend upon to survive. If a situation is forced where survival of the fittest becomes less about ingenuity and more about the most efficient assimilation of a biosphere with re-shuffled diversity, humans aren't going to come out on top. We're too big, take too long to reach reproductive age, we reproduce slowly, so our rate of genetic adaptation is glacial and we tend to kill each other at an alarming rate when resources become scarce.
I get the cognitive dissonance about AGW - it's almost impossible to actually conceive of an end to everything, but it really is actually on its way if we don't seriously revise our ways. There's a good reason why books, music, films, games are so popular - if we spend too many long periods experiencing reality, it fucks us up. We're a young species and despite the superficial plausibility of sci-fi renditions of utopian (or even dystopian) futures; there really is no guarantee that we don't get consigned to the fossil record as an also ran. Crocodiles and sharks must be laughing their asses off.
Tony_Tarantula on 16/3/2015 at 04:42
Quote Posted by faetal
There's a good reason why books, music, films, games are so popular - if we spend too many long periods experiencing reality, it fucks us up. We're a young species and despite the superficial plausibility of sci-fi renditions of utopian (or even dystopian) futures; there really is no guarantee that we don't get consigned to the fossil record as an also ran. Crocodiles and sharks must be laughing their asses off.
You could argue that the opposite is true as well. When people spend almost all their interactions in the context of fiction, you get the purple-haired freaks who go on righteous rampage over trivialities that normal people don't even notice. Hell go take a look over at the Bioware forums where you can find posters who are taking the oppression against the elves in a fictional contest as seriously as people used to take real racial issues back in the day.
On global warming....where's what's his name when you need him? I forget his username, the guy that was banned after 20-something pages of trolling a global warming thread.
Tony_Tarantula on 16/3/2015 at 04:45
Also, despite the passive agressive shtick Carlin makes a good point. There's still going to be some kind of an ecosystem whatever we do but there's no guarantee that human extinction won't be a part of any changes that result:
[video=youtube;BB0aFPXr4n4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB0aFPXr4n4[/video]
faetal on 16/3/2015 at 09:23
Yes of course. Life bounced back nicely after the Permian mass extinction too. One could argue that today's brilliant (though rapidly diminishing) diversity couldn't have existed without a big old wiping of the slate. Doesn't bode well for anyone wishing to play Half Life 3 though.
