Vanishing Logic
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Reading over the latest IPCC drivel, the “Fourth Assessment Report”, I come to an interesting claim — that 30% of the of the Earth’s species face an increased risk of vanishing if global temperatures rise 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
The formerly sane Greenpeace said “This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future.”
Given that global temperatures have risen nearly four degrees since the early 1800’s, what species have vanished due specifically to warming or related phenomenon?
If you hear only crickets in the background, then we know of two species that are doing just fine.
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7 Responses to “Vanishing Logic”
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If you have polite and articulate comments, please provide them. Rants and flames are discarded.
I wonder why you find the IPCC reports drivel.
According to wikipedia – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.’
Also according to wikipedia the average global temperature has not risen by nearly as much a 4 degrees since the 1800s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#Recent
It seems as if you are plucking figures from thin air, or perhaps you have been talking too long with the penguins.
‘Lord knows I’ve dug into it enough to be on a first name basis with some antarctic penguins’
Ignoring for a moment that several IPCC scientist resigned because they believed the reports to be flawed, and later threatened to sue to have their names removed, we have to note that (a) the data collection use is incomplete, (b) some of their proxies and combinations or proxies are highly suspect, and (c) their projects are computer models based on a ton of pure theory, none of which is verifiable.
Add in rather suspect analysis done by IPCC members (such as one published report that, when showing historical temperatures managed to eradicate both the Little Ice Age and the medieval warming period), and I begin to believe that the IPCC reports are not worthy of review.
The long-term data is available to everyone. Go to NOAA’s web site and download the ice core data tables. Go to the NASA web site and find the ice core CO2 data. Any of the resources that I used are publicly available and tend to draw one towards the conclusion that man is a tiny, almost immeasurable influence on global climate.
‘..man is a tiny, almost immeasurable influence on global climate.’
yeah right
‘The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth’s equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/deforestation-the-hidden-cause-of-global-warming-448734.html
‘Our study shows that only tropical rainforests are strongly beneficial in helping slow down global warming,”
“It is a win-win situation in the tropics because trees in the tropics, in addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, promote convective clouds that help to cool the planet.”‘
‘“Tropical forests are like Earth’s air conditioner” ‘
But apparently – ‘polar forests warm the Earth “because their dark canopy absorbs sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space by a bright white covering of snow.” This absorption of sunlight outweighs the cooling effect of carbon storage. Bala and colleagues say the expected climate-fueled expansion of boreal forests in the future will worsen global warming, making some places up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100 than they are today.’
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0409-forests.html
This is what happens when man f***s about too much with the enviroment. A little manmade effect can tip a delicate balance making things worse and worse.
I have never seen a “delicate balance” in nature. Nature is a violent lady with perpetual PMS. She changes biological boundaries on a whim, and for all the ages has destroyed and redesigned micro-environments on the planet. Mankind is at best an irritant, as George Carlin said “An annoying case of fleas.”
Your very biological existence is a delicate balance. Without the right conditions of light, warmth, food and water a plant or animal will die, it’s existence depends on the right balance of conditions, as do ecosystems.
‘Nature is a violent lady with perpetual PMS.’
This analogy seems entirely inappropriate, perhaps you should not project your own misgivings about the female sex onto Gaia.
‘She changes biological boundaries on a whim, and for all the ages has destroyed and redesigned micro-environments on the planet.’
I suppose this is true, and man is part of Nature, but our actions are contributing torwards the current mass extinction of species – Nature may survive adverse conditions but perhaps only in the form of a thriving population of cockroaches.
‘Mankind is at best an irritant, as George Carlin said “An annoying case of fleas.” ‘
Fleas probably have as much respect for their host as mankind has for the Earth.
George Carlin seems very funny -
“I don’t have pet peeves — I have major psychotic f***ng hatreds!”
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
But I don’t think his arguements make sense -
‘And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?’
But has the planet ever had to fight cancer, which is what mankind has been compared to – satellite images of cities from space look very similar to cancerous growth.
‘Lets look first at why a cell in the body becomes cancerous. In the centre of each cell are the genes. They contain the information that keep you functioning as a single living organism, rather than just a bowl of biological soup. Now if the genes in a cell are disturbed, that cell may become selfish, . . it may no longer support the system as a whole, but instead go off, doing its own thing, at the expense of the body , – - it becomes a cancer.’
Peter Russell