Mean Variation: ±22; Human change +100.

[Crissa]

Guess what those numbers are? they are the depressing but real numbers of the change in CO2 in the atmosphere.

Humans have increased the amount of CO2 in the air by 100 ppm (parts per million) in the last hundred years. Over the last 600,000 years - the amount of ice data we have - the natural cycles have a mean (think average) variation of 22 ppm.

-Crissa

[Maj]

I've not had much luck in finding information on the specifics of linking carbon dioxide data from the ice cores to measurements from real time. I know there's a gap there, and I know that adjustments have had to be made so that the numbers line up.

Does anyone have a good place where I can look?

[Crissa]

Finding raw data on the internet is sometimes difficult, because of the simplicity of key words. Most peer reviewed papers are hidden behind pay walls anyhow.

There are some good sources, but a simple google search finds a few papers on the subject...

-Crissa

[K]

Finding raw data on the internet is sometimes difficult, because of the simplicity of key words. Most peer reviewed papers are hidden behind pay walls anyhow.

There are some good sources, but a simple google search finds a few papers on the subject...

-Crissa

Firefox has an add-in that supposedly cuts through pay walls.

[Koumei]

Is there anything Firefox can't do these days? Break through pay-walls (though I imagine that's illegal), detect Rickrolls and duckrolls, auto-refresh, keep tabs in the browser (unless you're in Sovjet Russia, where browser keeps tabs on YOU!)... I'm pretty sure I saw an add-on that created world peace.

[JonSetanta]

Is there anything Firefox can't do these days? Break through pay-walls (though I imagine that's illegal), detect Rickrolls and duckrolls, auto-refresh, keep tabs in the browser (unless you're in Sovjet Russia, where browser keeps tabs on YOU!)... I'm pretty sure I saw an add-on that created world peace.

Stop the presses. This is Serious Business.
What's the extension/add-on called?

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Finding raw data on the internet is sometimes difficult, because of the simplicity of key words. Most peer reviewed papers are hidden behind pay walls anyhow.

There are some good sources, but a simple google search finds a few papers on the subject...

-Crissa

Firefox has an add-in that supposedly cuts through pay walls.

Which add-on is that? BugMeNot gets you past free registration pages, but that add-ons terms of use prohibit submitting a password for pay sites.

[Koumei]

Stop the presses. This is Serious Business.
What's the extension/add-on called?

http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

Seriously:

http://www.rickrolldetector.com/

[Maxus]

My Earth History teacher was been instructed by his doctor to keep away from the subject of global warming because of his blood pressure.

Not for the reason you'd think, though.

He's more skeptical of the global warming science, because of things like us technically living in a glacial minima during an ice that's due to end in 500 to 1000 years (any day now, to hear him tell it), and he spent a week detailing what a hot planet actually means, how Waterworld got the planetary volume of water wrong, and how what's unusual about the planet right now is not that it's heating up, but that we have continental glaciers on it right now.

Personally, I'm keeping an open mind.

[JonSetanta]

http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

Seriously:

http://www.rickrolldetector.com/

Hey, can't tell what's legit or not. Or what you specifically used.

But as with every war, an internet war of the Roll de la Rick requires defenses greater than the opposition.


Edit: this looks better, actually.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6927

[Username17]

While much of the Earth's history has in fact had all the water as liquid, and thus we could see the encroachment of the oceans as a natural process (and indeed one which has been going on for thousands of years), the fact is that most human settlements are on the coast. The White Cliffs of Dover are sediment from Cretaceous Era Sea Shells, and I really really don't want to move all cities and farming far enough inland that we are able to use those as the new shallows.

Over the last couple thousand years, water has steadily encroached on Mahabalipuram, such that of the original temples, only one of them is still on dry land. The concrete steps the Spanish made dow to the shore in Monterey now go straight into the sea. That's been a slow and gradual process that has caused buildings to relocate one at a time. When ice blocks the size of Texas break off, I'm more worried. Because if we lose the equivalent of one Mahabalipuram in every coastal city all at once, we're seriously fucked.

The point of getting a hold on global warming is not to keep the climate from changing - we don't have the power to do that. It's to keep it from changing so rapidly that we can't do anything about it.



-Username17

[Calibron]

Thank you. I had a vague idea that this is actually what all the environmentalists that actually knew what the fvck they were talking about meant, but I've never actually seen anyone say it.

I mean, those stupid commercials that have been coming on lately pleading for your help to, I shit you not, "stop climate change". They fill me with rage and disgust.

Short of a nuclear holocaust we really don't have the power to completely ruin the planet, but without becoming more environmentally friendly we can certainly screw ourselves over.

[PhoneLobster]

we really don't have the power to completely ruin the planet

Actually there are various potential doomsday scenarios and at least two of them are global warming related.

You don't hear about the really nasty scenarios so much because they are unpopular. Aside from being unpleasant to consider the debate has also been handily reframed by rabid denialists until the worst theories one is allowed to "seriously" talk about in public are actually some of the more mild possibilities.

Global Warming Doomsday 1) Breaking the ecosystem.

OK so changing too fast would be bad. Ranging from inconvenient to a danger to civilization. But it might change WAY too fast, so fast that the wide spread extinctions get really out of hand. And we don't know exactly how fast that would need to be.

Anyway the thing is that there are various theories about ecosystems, especially the really big ones. Now you got some where it is resilient and self correcting and others were it is a fragile interlaced web. But even if it IS self correcting... imagine it like an economic market "self correction" we could be talking a MAJOR crash.

As in next thing you know all the Krill are dead or the Plankton then bam, the ocean is just mud, jelly fish and starved corpses. Or that happens simultaneously to multiple ecosystems and a world wide collapse leaves us with rats as the biggest life form on the planet.

This sort of stuff has happened before, numerous times. Mega extinction events that wiped out the vast majority of life forms on the planet. This shit happens, I remember reading an interesting article suggesting that one of those events in the fossil record was actually an ice age brought about by JELLY FISH, I mean, heck, you think HUMANS can't do better than that.

Global Warming Doomsday 2) Venus
OK. So the thing is we don't really know exactly how much carbon dioxide there is out there.

We got a good idea how much we add directly.

But the thing is temperature and other changes have damaged the plankton in the ocean and now it's not so great at removing it anymore.


If I recall the various related bits and pieces I've picked up from new scientist over recent years...

The permafrost is now melting. And that shit is FULL of massive reserves of greenhouse gas.

Any deaths of trees and plants caused by droughts and heat waves, more greenhouse gasses, less clean up of green house gasses.

Loss of glaciers and ice caps? Loss of vast regions of the globe that formerly reflected a certain additional degree of heat right back out into space again.

There are numerous essentially unaccounted for or newly discovered effects that feed into the greenhouse effect. And some suggestion that even if we stopped with the cars and coal power plants now it is sufficiently self sustaining to maintain and grow by itself.

And the limit of the potential growth is unknown. It is HOPED, even theorised that there are upper limits that are acceptable to human survival or that some sort of lucky environmental self correction will miraculously save our asses.

And "acceptable" change includes the scenario, suggested by a prominent scientist who actually ascribes to a self correcting environmental model (pretty much invented one) that humans will only be able to reasonably survive in the Arctic circles.

Worse is the possibility that it could get very VERY hot. Maybe even Venus hot.

But it wouldn't even need to get that irreversibly insanely hot to basically set evolution all the way back to the single cell level. And that would be bad for us.


So yeah. Many likely scenarios, odds are we will only cause an "inconvenience" up to and including the end of civilisation as we know it.

Even if it gets really bad, and does so too fast for civilisation and many ecosystems, it will take like maybe a century or two (though increasingly as the evidence rolls in it looks like it will be significantly "inconvenient" much faster, like maybe 50 years). So ignoring the less pleasant newer data... suck on that my unlikely to exist great great grand kids!

But the edge case scenarios like breaking the ecosystem until rats inherit the earth or turning the place into Venus. They have at least some minimal potential.

[JonSetanta]

Climate shift in response to human pollution is met with equal yet opposite amounts of environmental disasters.
Eventually, many previously inhabited human-dominant areas will become inhospitable to us tiny bipedal air-breathing mammals. And as a result the pollution stops, the Earth goes back to its original self-balance, like any living organism.

As a believer of the theory of Cartesian Dualism I really don't give a shit about our human bodies. If this race is gone, it's gone.
But if those same individuals insisting on exploiting natural resources for the sake of special interest groups or profit continue to do so in the afterlife, well, then I'll be ragin'.

[Crissa]

The planet doesn't care what we do.

But individually, many lifeforms do care. Including me. Because that's where all my stuff is.

-Crissa

[Username17]

The Earth existed for over a billion years with no life on it at all. Evolution is a mechanism whereby anything that survives at all will eventually diversify. But if nothing survives, nothing evolves.

-Username17

[Maxus]

If I remember my earth history right, evolution actually goes up a gear during times when the planet is hot. It's during the ice ages that things trim down, only to diversify again when the planet gets hot again.

Heck, the planet was on average 15 degrees warmer during the time of the dinosaurs, and these days climate change experts are worried about a quarter of a degree.

I agree that if the ice caps seriously try to thaw out, the inhabitants of some cities are going to be wading until they decide to relocate and the polar bears are SOL, but I've long since gotten numb to the tragedy of individual species going extinct because I know it's happened all the time. And then afterwards, things are going to pick up as life expands to fill the gaps.

[JonSetanta]

Really?
I've read and heard that diversity and evolution are both low in rainforest or tropical environments, yet high in cold.
Probably due to the selective process weeding out the weak or ill-adapted.

But worldwide heat might have different effects. Climate shift, for instance, both brings species together and splits others apart.

Currently, the worldwide trend is for smaller animals in larger groups. This is partly due to human over-fishing and lack of many old predators (wolves, for instance, would keep the 3 million and climbing deer population down here in the U.S.) but also due to food sources being shuffled for animals like a deck of cards.
I wonder what will be on the menu in 20 years?

[Username17]

Remember: evolution happens because there is a "selective pressure." That means that something is "favored." Unfortunately what that means is that there is something which kills almost everything, and then if any creatures have genetic powers that allow them to survive become the parents of the entire next generation.

So for example: imagine you have something that will kill people if they don't have laser eyebeams. If no one has any laser eyebeams, everyone is dead and there is no next generation. If anyone has laser eyebeams, then the next generation will be composed only of their children. Meaning that the next generation will have everyone with eyebeams or no one at all.

This is why rapid changes are really bad. If you have a slow temperature change, then you'll eliminate everyone who has a very weak heat tolerance, and the remaining population will be the offspring of those with a higher heat tolerance only. That next generation will itself have a range of heat tolerances whose average is substantially higher. And they'll have children and the cut off point will keep going up and up and eventually the temperature will be very high indeed and the available heat tolerances will be high enough to accommodate it. But if the change is too rapid, it seriously could wipe out enough that the remaining population is insufficient to repopulate the world.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Remember: evolution happens because there is a "selective pressure." That means that something is "favored." Unfortunately what that means is that there is something which kills almost everything, and then if any creatures have genetic powers that allow them to survive become the parents of the entire next generation.
-Username17

Evolution also likes to fill its niches. Evolution can happen just by genetic isolation (however it occurs, I can think of it happening by specialization and geographic isolation, offhand) and then things being left alone after the previous niche occupants died out will eventually take up the slack to take advantage of the resources being unused.

I'm also pretty sure that it's highly unlikely that rapid global heating could knock out all of the species on the planet. I mean, even if we kill ourselves out, the next sentient species to arrive might be descended from camels or something.

So some species would go extinct, and then the remaining ones would spread out to take advantages of the available resources.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

This is why rapid changes are really bad. If you have a slow temperature change, then you'll eliminate everyone who has a very weak heat tolerance, and the remaining population will be the offspring of those with a higher heat tolerance only. That next generation will itself have a range of heat tolerances whose average is substantially higher. And they'll have children and the cut off point will keep going up and up and eventually the temperature will be very high indeed and the available heat tolerances will be high enough to accommodate it. But if the change is too rapid, it seriously could wipe out enough that the remaining population is insufficient to repopulate the world.

That is also why cyclical climate change is bad. A general example being the large prehistoric mammals like the Mammoth. It's ancestors lived in a warmer climate, and then an ice age occurred. The Mammoths adapted to living in a colder climate, and those who could not perished. Then when the ice age ended, the climate changed back to what it was like previously. Even though the climate changed back to what the Mammoth ancestors had lived in, the Mammoth went extinct.

The initial change forced by the ice age specialized the Mammoths, this in turn left them even more unsuited to adapting to a second climate change.

So, speculating: The current climate change caused by humans, if rapid enough, could cause a mass ecological dying off, and subsequent specialization of remaining creatures. After that however, as a result of a different human interference (or the stopping of human interference?), a second rapid climate change could occur and finish the job.

[Calibron]

I seriously doubt we'll end up extinct unless everything larger than a rat also ends up extinct. Just physically humans are extremely adaptable to various climes; beyond that we've got the whole sentience thing, and thousands of years of technological advances and infrastructure to pull on.

[ckafrica]

I look at the mantis shrimp (the pictures on wiki aren't good but you can google image search it) and ask, "how the hell did this evolve?"

Either God or some demented wizard must have had something to do with it. Cool critter in any case.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I look at the mantis shrimp (the pictures on wiki aren't good but you can google image search it) and ask, "how the hell did this evolve?"

Either God or some demented wizard must have had something to do with it. Cool critter in any case.

I think it would be awesome if TNE included some monsters inspired by little-known real world creatures like the mantis shrimp. There are tons of real world creatures with unique abilities and senses that are not replicated in any game.

I would love to see an encounter with a giant sea monster that used a supernatural cavitation attack. Pow!

Both types strike by rapidly unfolding and swinging their raptorial claws at the prey, and are capable of inflicting serious damage on victims significantly greater in size than themselves. In smashers, these two weapons are employed with blinding quickness, with an acceleration of 10,400 g and speeds of 23 m/s from a standing start [5], about the speed and force of a .22 caliber bullet. Because they strike so rapidly, they generate cavitation bubbles between the appendage and the striking surface [5]. The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produce measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1,500 N that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface, which means that the prey is hit twice by a single strike; first by the claw and then by the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follow [6]. Even if the initial strike misses the prey, the resulting shock wave can be enough to kill or stun the prey.

[JonSetanta]

We'd have to lose Earth's atmosphere entirely in order to have a barren planet, and even then there's a chance for multicellular life to remain for another billion years.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrada