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ucfengr
Guest
Why should less than 1 C warming, or cooling for that matter, over a century or so worry anybody?
Holy See: moral imperative to act in face of climate change [CWN]
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jimmy
Guest
You come to your conclusions based on someone’s sense perception, whether it is your own sense perception or that of another. In addition to disregarding our senses, we are expected to disregard our reason atleast in as much as it contradicts what we are told. Why should I accept the claim that it is warming, while the temps actually show that it has been stagnant or even cooling for a significant portion of the time they claim it has been warming? The last twenty years have not warmed. I recently heard that the ice caps are more extensive than they have been in a long time.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
No, scientists use an extensive network of sensors and data gathered over long periods of time. This is quite different from relying on personal perception.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
Sea level rising 23" by 2100 will be of concern to your great grandchildren.
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ucfengr
Guest
23" over a 100 years works out to 1/4" per year. It sounds like we’ve got some time to validate the computer models for a couple decades and maybe look at alternatives to mitigate the sea rise before we decide to disrupt our entire transportation, energy, and agricultural industries. We probably have some time to consider the trade-offs too. A warmer climate means a longer growing season and more land available to cultivate. Perhaps the trade-off of being able to feed more people is worth the cost of putting up a few sea walls and levees to mitigate against the rising tide.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
This is strictly a first-world capability. Most of the people living near the sea are also living in a third world country without any means of undertaking what the Dutch did. You have to be very rich to do that. Sure, some people might benefit from a longer growing season. But how is that benefit going to be of any use to the subsistence farmers who will be displaced? Are you suggesting a massive relocation effort paid for by the US to relocate the millions of affected people into the US and to distribute to them the bounty of the few who do benefit from global warming? Or is that just “someone else’s problem” (which we created)?
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ucfengr
Guest
Third world countries won’t benefit from warmer weather and a longer growing season? Would they be better off with colder weather and a shorter growing season then? Or is it your assertion that this is the Mary Poppins climate (“practically perfect in every way”)? In any case, a 1 C temperature rise and a 2 foot sea level rise over a 100 years sounds like a manageable problem, not the end of the world as we know it. We should treat it that way. Look at the benefits of a warmer climate and compare them to the costs. Look at the costs of mitigating the problem without radically changing our energy, agriculture, and transportation industries vs. the cost of making the radical change. Don’t forget, the third world benefits from cheap energy and transportation too, and from modern agricultural methods, perhaps more than the first world. Have you asked them what they’d prefer? Maybe they don’t want to stay locked into the third world lifestyle of substanence farming.
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lynnvinc
Guest
Planning a sci-fi novel, are you?
Well, first of all that would just take too long for the sea to rise that much, since it takes the ice many centuries to melt from GW. From what I learned it would take us pursuing the business-as-usual path of increasing GHG emissions (r/t decreasing as we should) for the next 100 or so years to pretty much sink DC, say, by 60 feet, which might occur at the soonest, say, around 2700. That’s just a wild guesstimate; some climate scientists might know better, but I’ve actually been in contact with them and that’s the impression they gave me.
A quicker way to sink DC would be if some really super-volcanos in Antarctica were to erupt, something along the lines of the Siberian traps that spewed out so much carbon and melting that it caused the greatest warming and extinction event ever.
There is enough ice in Antarctica to put DC and many other places under water (60 meters). So I’d suggest your character just nuke Antarctica and try to trigger the really deep, serious volcanoes there.
There is actually a sci-fi novel based on that premise – not the nuking part, but the volcano part. Can’t remember the name or authors (there were 2) – it was over a decade ago, and it wasn’t well known (I think vanity press).
Or another way would be to pump hot water into the permafrost (which is mainly gravel and undecomposed biota held together with ice), releasing vast stores of methane (25 times more potent GHG than CO2). Even tho CH4 degrades into CO2 in about 10 years, if enough CH4 were released in a short enough time period, less than 10 years, that could send the world past tipping points into climate hysteresis, a great warming as during the end-Permian extinction. I actually thought of that for a sci-fi novel some 10 yrs ago…the super-villians were a bunch of end-timers who thought they were helping God bring about the end-times.
However, I was not focusing on rising seas (which just take too long), but more on the threat (their plot was foiled) of extreme heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms.
Then I thought up another sci-fi story about 8 years ago (but have never had time to develop either story): Around the year 2700 the remnants of humanity, huddled around the hot, desolate, famine-stricken arctic are dying out from the AGW our generations have caused and there is no hope. But they have managed to invent time travel by then, so they figure the best strategy to save humanity from extinction is to send a special ops soldier back in time (to the near-future) to kill the fictional US president. They figured that action would best steer the course for survival, difficult as it would still be, instead of total extinction. However, when the soldier arrives in the near future he falls in love with a very strict pacifist… It has a great ending.
In that story when they fly the soldier down from the arctic to Cathedral Mount in DC (the cathedral a heap of rubble) so he can then travel back in time on location, the capitol is totally submerged, with just the Washington monument sticking up out of the water and the top of the Capitol Dome, and the climate is so hot life can’t survive there.
I wrote it up as a screenplay, but never got a chance to develop it property…too much work, so if anyone wants the story and wants to run with it, let me know.
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