So you read my post, which was a question to you, and you chose to pretend the question didn’t exist. You’re more garden-variety than I thought.
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1500 years ago, your ancestors were fighting with, and also against King Arthur. 1500 hundred years from now, your descendants will be building a Matrioshka Brain
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I live in Western Civilization, in a city which will be under a mile of ice in 1500 years unless something is done to stop it. We are near the end of the Holocene interglacial period. Read that again slowly. “inter” … “glacial”. You’re worried about relatively minor effects which will occur in 100 years, I’m worried about ones that are catastrophic in 1500 years. I won’t apologize for wanting to preserve my country, and my civilization. Plus Canada will be entirely entombed in ice if we don’t do something now, and I like Canada.
Hmmm: 35 years, or 1500 years…which should I worry about more?
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You do realise that a mile of ice tends to be the product of tens of thousands of years of snowfall, don’t you?
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You do realise that a mile of ice tends to be the product of tens of thousands of years of snowfall, don’t you?
You do realize that there will be one winter, right when the ice age starts, where the ice from that winter does not fully melt, and then year upon year, the snow accumulates. It doesn’t have to be a mile thick to wipe out the country. Try 50 feet…
Does it really matter? If the carbon dioxide concentration falls below 240 ppm, then perhaps whoever’s running the Earth in 1500 years time should worry that a glacier in Nunavet is advancing towards Boston at the rate of substantially less than 130 meters a year . But, seeing as Carbon dioxide levels are about 397 ppm, and are expected to rise to substantially higher levels, it’s of little concern.
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Not sure why henry_minsky is worried about something as trifling as the next ice age when there’s a planet-killing asteroid floating around out there with Earth’s name on it. Let’s do something about that.
And then there’s the whole issue with the sun running out of fuel in several billion years…hopefully we won’t have run out of oil by then otherwise we might be able to delay its demise.
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And then there’s the whole issue with the sun running out of fuel in several billion years
Whew… I thought for second there that you said “several million years”. I was getting worried.
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I’ve got good news for you! The glacial rate is breaking records!
Indeed. We should worry for our children’s children in such a freeze. Winter forever and never christmas. A bleak future. We need a talking lion and some posh kids, that ought to do it.
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The Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org/) has built a clock which runs for 10,000 years. If you put that on a clock face, the glaciers would be expected to be here by about 2 o’clock. The Idea of their organization is try to promote long term thinking. The next ice age will not bury their clock, because it’s down in the southwest desert someplace.
But here’s what things will look like (again)
I don’t understand the smug superiority people have here that they are thinking so far ahead (100 years) than the stupid ‘deniers’ who can’t think more than a decade ahead, and yet a known (not hypothetical or modeled) cycle of disaster that we are at the end of is scheduled to hit within less than two thousand years. You think you are so morally superior because you’re thinking of the grandchildren, yet perhaps putting the planet into much worse shape for just 30 generations beyond them. If we can affect the climate now by warming it, who is to say we can’t prevent the cycle of cooling.
Well if we ever reach the point where we can confidently fine tune (or even “coarse tune”) the world’s climate to the point where we can avoid the next (and future) ice age without turning the planet into a sauna then I’m all for it. Maybe a few hundred more years of experiments along with the inevitable disasters will teach us what we need to know.
My hyperbolic examples were more to suggest the futility of hoping to be able to avert disasters on the scales of ice ages and errant asteroids. Maybe (hopefully) I’ll be proven wrong.
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The thing is that the problem isn’t simply temperatures, but rates of change that ecosystems and civilizations have trouble adapting to. A very rapid increase or decrease is a bad thing. A rapid increase now to prevent a not-quite-as-rapid decrease later isn’t actually a mitigation, it’s only a different problem.
Besides, now we know how to heat up the atmosphere within the span of a century or so. So if nobody expects an ice age within a few millennia, there’s no reason to support doing that now. Quite the contrary; maybe in the future we’d be better at doing it, have an occasion that doesn’t involve so many cases of droughts, extreme weather, and all sorts of other damage, or actually prepare for them, who knows.
The idea that future problems mean we shouldn’t worry about how many lives are being ruined right now, countries destabilized, ecosystems disrupted, and species extinguished is not part of taking the long view. It’s being indifferent to present problems. After all, with hundreds of generations between them, we could easily worry about warming now and cooling in the distant future.
An ice age is not going to be a problem for “Western civilization” if we can’t be bothered to make sure it lasts that long, and fortunately, the idea that we somehow couldn’t care about both is an entirely false dichotomy.
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One reason I’d be considerably less worried about an ice age is that, technically, we’re living in one now, and humans evolved during this ice age. This is just a relatively warm period; humans have survived much colder periods, including the last glacial period, 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. We’ve evolved for the cold extremes of Earth’s historical range of temperatures.
Obviously, a new glacial period would require major relocations of population centers and significant changes to agriculture. But, renewed glaciation would develop over the course of centuries. We’d have time to adapt.
If the Earth experiences a 5 C increase in average temperature over a century, that will be the most rapid rate of climate change in the last 50 million years.
For most of the history of the Earth, it’s been much hotter than this. I think we’re significantly less likely to survive the effects of runaway greenhouse effects, which by the Clathrate gun hypothesis is what led to the Permian-Triassic extinction event, in which 70% of terrestrial species and 96% of oceanic species went extinct.
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Yup. Humans can put on coats and grow food in greenhouses. Living through lifetimes of drought and extreme weather…not so easy.
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I don’t think active denialists are the target audience. Rather, as @jjsaul says upthread, it’s the people who are on the fence, the people who don’t have their own set of tools to judge denialists’ arguments. “Hey, that’s true, it is a pretty cold winter! How can there be global warming?” Those people.
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That is pretty much the point of this guidebook. It is not about providing contradictory empircal evidence to any particular myth, it is about effective communication when dealing with denialists.
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