I actually think that there is a very big
problem, but possibly not
what we are being told. What we
don't know is whether reality will be worse,
better, or as
bad but in a different way, as the
predictions.
Well, if you consider that the IPCC reports are
filtered
through a political process and every word is approved by
politically-appointed members from every member
country (including the
OPEC ones!), it's no surprise that
their predictions tend to be
conservative.
If you read the scientific papers that lie behind the
IPCC reports, though, you find a wide range of uncertainty.
The predicted
impacts range from "Oh, that's not going to be
much fun!" right through to "I
wonder if my great
grandchildren will have any hope of surviving this?" (no
joke...)
I read one just a week or two back, that stated the last
time
the paleoclimate record has CO2 levels & temps
comparable to the high end
of predictions, there were no
animals living within the tropics, and the
tropical oceans
were completely devoid of any life other than heat-loving
algae & bacteria.
Impacts on humans may be just as devastating.
Recent
studies suggest global rice crops could fall by at least a
third by the
end of the century, and wheat & other grains
don't far much better. How
are we going to feed 9+ billion
with a third less food than we have today? Not
to mention
water issues, with changing rainfall patterns.
We're already
seeing some impacts of this. South West
Australia is a classic example.
Annual rainfall has dropped
about 30% or more in the last 2-3 decades, as the
weather
patterns that previous brought that area rain shift further
away from
the equator and toward the south pole, pushing
them off the south coast of
Australia. It's worse than it
sounds, though, because a 30% drop in rainfall
means
something like an 80% drop in river flows. Inflows into
dams in the
area have dropped accordingly (see this graph),
and water security is a real issue.
That's why the gov't there has built a
desalination plant,
and a second is on the way, and they're talking about
re-
using treated wastewater.
And that's just one well-documented case.
There are
plenty of other changes around that are likely due to
climate
change, but attribution is difficult, because
natural variation is so large, so
it's only been done in a
few cases. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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What no-one is saying is what "green" energy such as wind turbines,
tidal schemes etc, is going to do to the environment. They gloss over that as if
the effects are negligible, which is almost certainly not true.
I
have also wondered about the effects of large quantities of wind turbines, etc.
TMK these effects simply aren't known. (I am always willing to learn if I am
wrong.) I suspect the effects won't be known until we have traveled a
significant distance down that path such as I doubt that at the beginning of the
industrial revolution anybody could imagine the problem with green house gases.
But if we know, as I think we do (again, I am willing to learn from serious
discussion) that green house gases are leading to serious problems, I think we
have to go down the road of alternatives and then try to deal with the problems
if/when they are discovered.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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