Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant
And finally a sane grown-up enters the room.Thank you.
Time for nonsense is way past over. It was over twenty years ago. We, collectively, and unfortunately, will suffer the consequence of the effect the misinformation campaigns Each of those designed and calculated to infuse doubt into the climate conversions. There was never a "debate". The "debate" was the misinformation injected by the fossil-fuel industry to prevent regulation and keep their profits high - the damage being done to the earth be damned. The "debate" was created by politicians, who knew better, but who put the fossil-industry money in their campaign coffers and would then "wink and nod" at the camera spewing nonsense about scientists disagreeing meaning no warming was happening. The US house and senate a full of them, with Jim Inhofe as the poster-boy and Marsha Blackburn running a close second. Corrupt leaders make corrupt bargains to serve corrupt personal interests. Preventing our planet from becoming uninhabitable isn't among the interests they hold.
I read though these comments and for those attempting to espouse nonsense about warming not occurring or being part of one of the extended natural cycles the earth sees due to perturbations in its orbit over eons, I feel disappointment. Not at the commenter directly, but disappointment that we collectively haven't done a better job at education and reaching out to those ignorant on the grave danger this issue represents to humanity. People basically fall into three-camps around global warming:
(1) those that know and have the integrity to address the issue directly,
(2) those that know, but accept some benefit in exchange for compromising their integrity to contribute to misinformation on the issue, and
(3) those that don't know, but pretend as if they do after hearing no more than a 15 second sound-bite and then the gullible loudly amplify the misinformation 128 characters at a time. (the loud-minority problem)
The unfortunate part is aggregation of wealth within the chemical and fossil-fuel industries and our failure to prevent its corrupting influence in politics sadly means the voices of (2) and (3) above are those that get amplified to the masses contributing to the morass we find ourselves in. For those with any lingering questions, please re-read [Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price](https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/02/heatwaves_future/) along with the linked articles therein. If you can't hold your hands under a 128°F faucet, what will 170°F feel like on the skin in the desert southwest of the U.S. when we reach 2070? Not even 50 years away.
As a parting note addressing the global temperature rising at a rate much faster than anticipated by many models, just as the data in this article sought to use the most conservative set that could be tuned to eliminate uncertainties to the greatest extent practicable, that has led to most estimates on the rate of warming being woefully conservative as well. One of the variables with the biggest impact on rate of rise and state of global warming is how must "committed-warming" the current numbers reflect. (how much of the warming we are seeing was due to emissions already released and adsorbed by the system in the 1970, 1980, 1990, etc.., the affect of which we are just seeing at present)
If this rapid rise we see today is because the "committed-warming" has a much longer look-back time than was thought and what we see manifesting now is a result of the committed-warming from the 70's our goose is cooked. That would be, we have not yet seen the impact from the committed-warming put into the system in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s or 2020s yet. So the climate impact due to committed-warming gets worse each year, just like compound-interest on a loan. The only question is whether we are amortizing the impacts over a 10, 20, 30 or 40 year note and what our interest rate is. The committed-warming is that aspect of the problem that means even if we went to a 100% clean and renewable sources of energy tomorrow, we would still experience global average temperature rise for the next hundred years.
The Anthropocene may just be a very brief global period (depending on what they settle on as its beginning), that leads into the 6th great mass extinction. Our window closed for staving off the worst aspects of climate change. What we do now and going forward will determine if the warming we will have will be survivable, and for how many?
As I look at my children, I'm sickened. This is our (collectively, me included) greatest societal failure of the last 50 years that we are passing on to them. The responsibility was ours to act in time to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.And we failed. The 1.5 deg C target was chosen because of the truly horrific consequences of going beyond 1.5 deg C, even incrementally past it. It was chosen as the target temperature that if exceeded ensured the irrecoverable melt of the Greenland ice sheet and the associated 10 meters of sea-level rise resulting in the forced-migration of between 35% and 40% of the worlds population away from crowded coastlines.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
