World Meteorological Organization: Carbon Dioxide hits 400ppm, 'Time is running out'

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

2.2329 * 10^57 cubic metres, according to my calculations :cool:
 
Actually a vast majority of life on earth has gone extinct due to being unable to adapt quick enough to severe climate change (be that the result of natural changes of external extinction events).

"Most extinctions have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct."

We are on a time scale of billions of years. Ofc most would be extinct now. Yet still life has adapted. There is still life on Earth. We are the smartest species ever to inhabit this planet.

You say vast majority of species are now extinct due to naturally occuring severe climate change.

Maybe this is one of those times.

WE ARE ALL DOOMED!!! DOOMED I TELL YE!!!

Lets all relax. I don't see us going anywhere for quite a while.
 
We are on a time scale of billions of years. Ofc most would be extinct now. Yet still life has adapted. There is still life on Earth. We are the smartest species ever to inhabit this planet.

You say vast majority of species are now extinct due to naturally occuring severe climate change.

Maybe this is one of those times.

WE ARE ALL DOOMED!!! DOOMED I TELL YE!!!

Lets all relax. I don't see us going anywhere for quite a while.
So your suggestion is, we should do nothing because it sounds bad?. Are you this critical of all scientifically accepted theories or just ones which sit against the political ideology you identify with.
 
So your suggestion is, we should do nothing because it sounds bad?. Are you this critical of all scientifically accepted theories or just ones which sit against the political ideology you identify with.

No I welcome change. I look forward to scientists cracking wind/ solar / tidal generation. The possibilities will become endless and hopefully it will be in my lifetime.

I just don't like the fact that we have this

'MANKIND CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING AND WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE HORRIBLE DEATHS'

'THE ANTARTICA IS MELTING AND WE ARE ALL GOING TO DROWN'

'THE OZONE IS GOING TO LEAVE US AND WE ARE ALL GOING TO BURN'

Lets tax the **** out of everything and everyone in the name of saving the planet. It's all these knee-jerk reactions that make people lose interest and make credible people seem less credible.

I'm like let's all chill. Let the scientists do their thing, when it comes it comes.

Can I ask what political identity you think I identify with?
 
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This was the exact doomsday stuff I was going on about. The face of the planet changes constantly, places warm up, places get colder, places become inhabitable, places become habitable.

As few people have stated it's all about adapting. These changes will happen over hundreds/ thousands of years. We wont wake up tomorrow and be underwater with no icebergs on Antartica.

lifeforms have adapted and survived for millions of years. We will do the same aslong as we dont kill one another.

Darwins theory of evolution. Back then it was strong vs weak. Now its rich vs poor. Whether you like it or not. People who can afford to survive will survive.

I am all for creating cleaner/ effiecient alternatives to fossil fuels, we have to, as they will run out, not sure when, and not any time soon, but they will. There is no doubt that we will crack wind/ solar / tidal energy one day.

In the mean time I would just rather not have all this doomsday 'man is the cause of climate change and we are all going to die horrible deaths' jibberish rammed down my throat.

Unfortunately, unlike all the other problems humans are causing (big list in an above post of mine) climate change will affect us. By us I mean the western world. "We" don't really care about the other problems like mass extinction and deforestation but "we" care about more flooding of rivers and coastlines in the the UK because that affects us and our economy directly...
 
Unfortunately, unlike all the other problems humans are causing (big list in an above post of mine) climate change will affect us. By us I mean the western world. "We" don't really care about the other problems like mass extinction and deforestation but "we" care about more flooding of rivers and coastlines in the the UK because that affects us and our economy directly...

No I do agree with you. My point of view is perhaps the costal erosion, increase in floods, etc. etc might have happened regardless.

Instead of spreading blame, and scaremongering why don't we just dress it up another way.

The climate is changing, places are heating up, cooling down, melting, disintergrating. Mankind may have caused it, may have helped it, may have had no part in it. But its happening. What are we as a collective going to do about it.
 
Sooo... we need an international society where people work for free, to the best of their ability, where money doesn't actually exist.

Welcome to Starfleet.

Or alternatively we still have money but we dont rely on a system that needs to inflate to survive. Our current system is based on our current debts being paid off by inflating them away, whether that be money or people. We're basically blowing up a balloon more and more, waiting for it to pop.

the overpopulation hypothesis is one of the most ill informed opinions that float the web.

Overpopulation is a myth, it does not exist and we are at no risk from it. In fact, earth is able to maintain multiples of the current global population without breaking a sweat.

UK is only 12% built over - not populated, that's considerably less, I'm talking about built over, including anything that's been concreted. Yeap, sounds strange doesn't it? You may be labouring under the misapprehension that UK is bursting at the seams with people and that 'our little island' can't take any more. The FACT is that only 12% of it has been built over, and probably around half of that is populated.

In FACT, you could probably put the whole earth population in the state of Texas at the same population/sq.m conditions as London. That's how populated earth is. Do some reading before you start spouting all this nonsense about population control and other rubbish.

And before you start shifting the goalposts into feeding the whole population etc. bear in mind that virtually the whole of africa is barely cultivated, only a fraction of the US is cultivated and most of asia is utilising primitive cultivation techniques. Using modern ones would solve all these problems easily.

Here's a link for the trolls.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

Where do all the other lifeforms fit into your grand plan of deforesting the world to feed an ever expanding population? Where will we get the water to help us grow all the crops in arid parts of the world, which are already having problems (and we're not just talking Africa and poor nations here, there are water issues in places like Spain and even the US)? What do we do with the pollution?

Personally I find it horiffic that 12% of the UKs land has been covered in concrete. How about the amount of land that has been converted to human activity overall? The amount of actual "wild" land in the UK is in the single percentages*, it's one of the reasons most of the British wildlife has been wiped out over centuries and why populations of surviving wildlife are still falling dramatically.

Perhaps you're happy to have your food intensively farmed and any green space set aside for intensive farming, doesn't mean we should allow it. Humans are one of millions of lifeforms on this planet, all of which have just as much right as us to be here. If you don't believe that then I hope you get trampled by a herd of cows, or better yet eaten by a lion, that way they can get their own back...;)

As an example we could turn over to US cattle farming standards. Would look nice between the town's don't you think?
a_cattle_farm_at_Estancia_002.jpg


* Remember, places such as Dartmoor, the Yorkshire moors and Dales and the lake district are all heavily managed, they certainly aren't natural environments. In fact they are some of the least diverse places in the country due to the management practices, many designed to keep biodiversity as low as possible. Much/most of the Scottish highlands are the same, designed for grouse and deer, with everything else, from pine martins to eagles decimated, even with protection orders on them.

There are still some wild places in the world, not many, but a few. We should be fighting to keep then from destruction and trying to stop their decline, better get, allowing them to reestablish themselves without human interference.
 
I am struggling with this, not the maths, I'll take them at face value. But this is talking about physical space, plus a rate of expansion that far engulfs anything we have.

In a world that mostly ticks on numbers that appear digitally, I am struggling to see his point.

If talking about over crowding, or over populating, we will never reach critical mass. Disease/ natural disasters/ human nature / money will take care of this.

I assume you didn't read the article then? The quote was used as a physical example analogous to the problems you have just mentioned...
 
No I do agree with you. My point of view is perhaps the costal erosion, increase in floods, etc. etc might have happened regardless.

Instead of spreading blame, and scaremongering why don't we just dress it up another way.

The climate is changing, places are heating up, cooling down, melting, disintergrating. Mankind may have caused it, may have helped it, may have had no part in it. But its happening. What are we as a collective going to do about it.

Exactly!

Part of me is insulted that we think we could cause (fullstop) global warming like many media and political sources propagate - it suits purposes to tax you more if you feel guilty for killing the planet.

Whereas as evidenced through geological surveying, the climate has gone hot - cold - hot - cold since the planet first had an atmosphere. I fully accept that we may have accelerated the process in this interim phase slightly, but the change is/was inevitable. Trying to insinuate otherwise is a fool's game, yet many still buy it and think that the whole reason for climate change is because Jimmy is driving a 300g/km emission car and used deodorant during College.
 
Or alternatively we still have money but we dont rely on a system that needs to inflate to survive. Our current system is based on our current debts being paid off by inflating them away, whether that be money or people. We're basically blowing up a balloon more and more, waiting for it to pop.
Indeed, capitalism doesn't have to be as bad as we have it at the moment - if anything it's the perversion of it's original intent which needs to be changed.

We can still keep a form of capitalism-light, regulated & reformed to prevent systemic collapse, the ballooning of debt & socially destructive wealth centralisation.
 
No I do agree with you. My point of view is perhaps the costal erosion, increase in floods, etc. etc might have happened regardless.

Instead of spreading blame, and scaremongering why don't we just dress it up another way.

The climate is changing, places are heating up, cooling down, melting, disintergrating. Mankind may have caused it, may have helped it, may have had no part in it. But its happening. What are we as a collective going to do about it.

How about another way. CO2 is normally released with other nasty gasses and particles, such as SO2, soot and CO just as a start. Seeing as most man made CO2 is emitted near or in places most people live (cars and industry in and around cities) should we not think about reducing pollutants and having cleaner air in our cities? It's estimated that tens of thousands dies from poor air quality (especially soot and other particulate matter) in the UK alone. London and several other cities are far above the safe levels set down by European scientists .

Why don't we try and reduce out consumption and emission of noxious fumes by turning to renewable electricity to power our industry and transport, giving us blcleaner air and saving tens of thousands of lives? Or do you still think we should ignore everything and keep burning fossil fuels as much as possible?
 
Exactly!

Part of me is insulted that we think we could cause (fullstop) global warming like many media and political sources propagate - it suits purposes to tax you more if you feel guilty for killing the planet.

Whereas as evidenced through geological surveying, the climate has gone hot - cold - hot - cold since the planet first had an atmosphere. I fully accept that we may have accelerated the process in this interim phase slightly, but the change is/was inevitable. Trying to insinuate otherwise is a fool's game, yet many still buy it and think that the whole reason for climate change is because Jimmy is driving a 300g/km emission car and used deodorant during College.

I'm a geologist and you're right, the climate has wobbled all over the place. We can tell by many palaeoproxies that the rate of change is significantly greater than would naturally happen without a major climate disaster... The argument is not that change is inevitable, the argument is we are speeding up that change (and it will affect us greatly).
 
How about another way. CO2 is normally released with other nasty gasses and particles, such as SO2, soot and CO just as a start. Seeing as most man made CO2 is emitted near or in places most people live (cars and industry in and around cities) should we not think about reducing pollutants and having cleaner air in our cities? It's estimated that tens of thousands dies from poor air quality (especially soot and other particulate matter) in the UK alone. London and several other cities are far above the safe levels set down by European scientists .

Why don't we try and reduce out consumption and emission of noxious fumes by turning to renewable electricity to power our industry and transport, giving us blcleaner air and saving tens of thousands of lives? Or do you still think we should ignore everything and keep burning fossil fuels as much as possible?

I am all for progression I said this.

Slight tangent. But it's never that easy. To create these renewable energy resources we need to first dig, refine, manufacture, transport, a whole range of materials. Mainly oil. Nothing else will get the job done.

But yes. Fundamentally, we do need to change. And the various ripple effect from making the switch one day will be unimaginable.
 
I assume you didn't read the article then? The quote was used as a physical example analogous to the problems you have just mentioned...

Nah I didn't you're right. But I guessed that was what it was getting at.

I don't think overcrowding / overpopulating will be a problem, that's just my view. I could be wrong.
 
Climate change is not a problem for the planet. Earth has been through change (and through periods of CO2 concentration above 1600ppm).

It's a problem for humans.
 
Climate change is not a problem for the planet. Earth has been through change (and through periods of CO2 concentration above 1600ppm).

It's a problem for humans.
Sounds similar to one of my favourite George Carlin quotes. :D

It's a good point which many of the climate change sceptics seem to misunderstand, just because the planet won't die - it doesn't mean that a vast majority of the human population (including them, something they also seem to think won't impact on them) won't clock out if it changes quicker than we can adapt.

I mean, even a thermonuclear war which decimates all of mankind & 90% of the species on earth - the planet & life would recover given enough time just fine. But that doesn't mean we should go & start flinging nukes safe in the knowledge the damage will be transitory.

While we can be confident climate change will be indeed transitory for the planet - it may not be for us.
 
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