"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."
— Paul Ehrlich
"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
— Kenneth Watt
The fact is, we've had 70+ temperature swings in the last 4,500 years, including 2 since 1970. It's odd we talk about catastrophic things happening when the earth warms, but what about the dire consequences when it starts to cool again?
A Swelling Volume Of Scientific Papers Now Forecasting Global Cooling In The Coming Decades:
http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scie...
I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.
a. Not a climate denier
b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed.
c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet.
Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what caused the change:
"The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h...
I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the amount of pollution they contribute.
https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning...
We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/sur...
That scientists predict and mispredict is nothing new, but the overwhelming evidence now is that climate change is here, and it's damaging.
If almost all climate change scientists are in fact wrong, but we decide that's a (slim) risk we can't afford to take and we do something about it then the worst that can happen is we perhaps slow down the economy of the world (which given that the economy, at least to my reading, is a self-referential pyramid scheme, doesn't really matter that much). There's even the possibility later if we discover that climate change is just a natural fluctuation that we don't have any impact on of just reverting to our old behaviour.
If we decide that climate scientists are wrong, and do nothing about it, but it turns out they were right, then the worst that can happen is that there is a huge amount of suffering, strife, and ultimately death.
Also, as far as I can tell from some limited research, "no tricks zone" seems to be pretty biased, and fairly easily debunked.
My understanding is that Ehrlich's prediction had little or nothing to do with climate change. He was making his statements based primarily on population growth.
> Kenneth Watt
I can't find any evidence, outside of highly-biased sites, that this was anything more than an isolated case of one ecologist postulating on the possible forms of climate change.
Who is doing this pre-conditioning?
> into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.)
Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse.
If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean.
If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
Please point out where I misunderstood you.
It seems to me that the dire consequences are about the ability of nations to deal with relatively sudden changes. We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale. Four thousand years ago it was much easier for humanity to shift production of food and seek out new places to live. Today not so much. This is especially so since almost no one knows how to live off the land anymore and the even if we did know this it isn't possible due to the massive decline in animal populations and habitat.
Four thousand years ago, just a two year drought and 1/3 of your village would die of starvation. Few people could move anywhere. Pastoral peoples moved around but during times of scare resources, like a drought, multiple groups moving to the last remaining pasture would result in a battle with mass killing.
The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.
If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones.
This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.
How did the USA lower emissions the most in 2017 while also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board and people are buying more efficient devices.
If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.
It'd be better to take all associated costs with implementing and verifying such a scheme, and give them out as grants to entrepreneurs creating electric vehicles, clean energy, greenhouse-neutral farming, etc.
Taking one example of a specific accord and saying, "because we didn't need this government [thing], we don't need any government [thing]," is a faulty generalization. Truth is, we need the government and the markets and several other things that work together in an extremely complex way (that no single human can understand fully) to solve global climate change.
If that's a thing, then I think your comment is also a thing.
