"Green" policies are destroying this country
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,148 Mod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 59077
I certainly do believe in personal responsibility as far as keeping my "carbon footprint" low, the problem remains a large chunk of humanity who don't and won't as they look to build the consumer societies we're used to. And I can understand them wanting to.
There's snake oil all over the place Ceeview and the more divisive the topic, the more is produced on both sides to counter the other and we tend to want to only swallow the snake oil we already believe in. So on one side we have the media screaming about climate change, well it used to be global warming, but they moved away from that, like they did global cooling which was a thing 30 years ago when another ice age was coming!.. Add in a more recent interwebs driven need for information all the time driven by human nature and marketing which had tended to make us ever more panicky. So we have Red weather warnings!! for two days of warm weather in Ireland that's the same as a nice day in June in the south of France and their world doesn't end.
On the other we have the "ah well the earth's climate has always changed!" and "it was hotter/colder in the past!" and "natural cycles!" etc. All true BTW but just as simplistic as we're doomed because the mercury nudges 30 degrees in Ireland. Yep it was hotter, often much hotter on earth in the past, especially the distant past. Our world has been "alien" many times in the past. If you had a time machine it could come as a shock. Before around the carboniferous period(where coal mostly comes from) you would have needed to wear an oxygen tank to walk around. In the permian you'd need some way to cool down as the planet was becoming a furnace and by the end of the permian you'd be lucky to last a few days as you watched the biggest mass extinction in the history of this planet, which made the dinosaurs dying out look like a picnic. As for dinosaurs; Jurassic park could never happen. The planet is too cold now and doesn't have enough oxygen to support them. Land masses were very different, as were ocean currents and weather cycles. The earth cooled down a lot after their extinction, land masses shifted around and ocean currents changed. Closer to now we then got into ice age cycles and the like.
On that front; one reason some thought an ice age was coming was because we're overdue one. On the natural cycles of the last couple of hundred thousand years interglacials(what we're living in now) lasted about 10-12,000 years so we're overdue woolly mammoths. It does look like human influence on climate has staved that off. The agricultural revolution where we cut down and burnt forests and planted crops and caused farmland and open plains to take over seems to have nudged the cycle enough.
The other problem with natural cycles as a simple explanation is a) yes they occurred but were generally slow to cycle and b) when they weren't the environment changed rapidly and extinctions kicked off. Ice ages again an example of that. They were far more rapid in onset than once believed. From mild and warm to ahh jaysus it's baltic in a couple of decades, well within a human lifetime. So let's look at CO2 levels in the holocene(basically the bit from growing oats, spuds an' that to today).
You can see a notable rise at the start and up and down variations and a very slow rise overall. Then we get to the industrial revolution and we see a very clear and very rapid spike upwards. Now it's not a lot, about 50 odd PPM, but that spike is undeniable. If we look at temperatures over the same time again we will see natural up and down variations, some quite wild, but overall the trend is upwards and again spikes upwards in the largest shift for millenia over the last century or so. The other thing about natural variations in the past was they tended to be much more local, not global. EG the Roman and medieval warm periods were much more evident in Europe than in Asia, Africa or the Americas. In the latter their el Nino could cause horrendous swings, some caused local civilisations to fall, but weren't noticed much if at all in Europe. Then we have massive volcanic erruptions which can cause all sorts of mayhem, local and global.
TL;DR? yes we had swings in CO2 and temperature in the past, but the recent swing upwards in both has been more rapid and more global and almost certainly as a result of human action. What this means in the medium and longterm and how we deal with it are other matters, but to deny that is up there with flat earthism.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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