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Sea levels could rise by 30ft, study warns


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All RIGHT!!! Beachfront property for ME!! :lol:

Where I live was once on a shore of a huge inland sea that divided North America. Just think, maybe my Grand Kids will be able be at the beach here again. The Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas and Southern New Mexico are actually not mountains. They are a fossil reef. Since nothing can ever be just natural I guess we would have to blame that global warming on Dinosaur farts. 

LOL, I remember not that many decades ago when we were told that we were heading into another ice age because of the air pollution. Our smog was keeping the sun from warming us properly. I read the other day that a Berkeley Scientist predicts that in 5 years the Arctic ice cap will melt to the point that the polar bears would become extinct. :o The problem is that he made that prediction over 20 years ago but they are still quoting him as an "authority". 

I don't really doubt that we may be in a warming cycle. There are a lot of indications that our sun may have some surprises in store for us. There were a BUNCH of X class Coronal mass ejections during the last high point of our solar cycle. What I don't go for is that the answer is to hamstring the industrialized free world in hopes that this MIGHT make a difference. If it gets warmer that will be where answers will come from. Besides all else let me tell you, people in New York and London can deal with a few degrees more warmth than trying to live under a mile of ice like was in the last ice age. People can adapt to a warmer environment but there is no adjusting to freezing temperatures year around over a major part of the world. 

Global warming, if it happens will be a slow change. If you lay on the beach for 10 or 20 years and refuse to move you might drown. That is evolution in action and no loss to the gene pool. Warmer weather has up sides too. Longer growing seasons means more food. I just tired of the stupid doom and gloom coming from people that can't even reliably predict whether it is going to rain tomorrow. The REAL fact is that there is BIG Money in bad news and not much in good news so guess what. Scientists that are looking for billions of dollars are going to tell you that it is the END if you don't finance them. 

I am getting up in years and I look back as see this cycle over and over again. I think of it as Doom de jour. Over and over and over again people fall for the latest end of the world crisis. 

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7 hours ago, DanL said:

LOL, I remember not that many decades ago when we were told that we were heading into another ice age because of the air pollution. Our smog was keeping the sun from warming us properly. I read the other day that a Berkeley Scientist predicts that in 5 years the Arctic ice cap will melt to the point that the polar bears would become extinct. :o The problem is that he made that prediction over 20 years ago but they are still quoting him as an "authority". 

I don't really doubt that we may be in a warming cycle. There are a lot of indications that our sun may have some surprises in store for us. There were a BUNCH of X class Coronal mass ejections during the last high point of our solar cycle. What I don't go for is that the answer is to hamstring the industrialized free world in hopes that this MIGHT make a difference. If it gets warmer that will be where answers will come from. Besides all else let me tell you, people in New York and London can deal with a few degrees more warmth than trying to live under a mile of ice like was in the last ice age. People can adapt to a warmer environment but there is no adjusting to freezing temperatures year around over a major part of the world. 

Global warming, if it happens will be a slow change. If you lay on the beach for 10 or 20 years and refuse to move you might drown. That is evolution in action and no loss to the gene pool. Warmer weather has up sides too. Longer growing seasons means more food. I just tired of the stupid doom and gloom coming from people that can't even reliably predict whether it is going to rain tomorrow. The REAL fact is that there is BIG Money in bad news and not much in good news so guess what. Scientists that are looking for billions of dollars are going to tell you that it is the END if you don't finance them. 

I am getting up in years and I look back as see this cycle over and over again. I think of it as Doom de jour. Over and over and over again people fall for the latest end of the world crisis. 

The minor dip in temps that occurred in the late 1960s only lasted about six years.  In climatology, 30 years is the minimum duration before we start predicting climate changes.  About that time there was a published article on the Milankovitch Cycles that contained an arithmetic mistake:  someone really did multiply two times two and get eight.  And that got by the reviewers.  So the author miscalculated the length of the average interglacial and decided we were due for another ice age.  The journal printed a correction, but the popular press finds corrections boring, especially when they can sensationalize the original article.  So in the interests of selling magazines, they ignored the correction and so you never found out about it.

During the Altithermal, 8000 YBP, the Arctic Ocean was mostly ice-free.  Somehow, polar bears survived that.  As I recall, that discovery was made a lot less than 20 years ago, like within the last five or so.  I know research is hard to keep up with.  So much comes out that even if you spent every waking hour reading, you couldn't cover it all.  But you can lay that idea to rest.  Polar bear numbers will likely decline substantially, but the polar bear, or at least a hybrid with polar bear genes will probably survive.

If the climate was following the Milankovitch Cycles, which it did for at least millions of years, we would be in a cooling phase.  But we're not.  The climate system parted company with the Milankovitch Cycles back in 1910, about 15 years before Milanokovitch discovered them.

How would providing cheaper electricity at a higher-than-current profit cripple industry?  Wind is the cheapest source of electricity in the market at about 5.3 cents per kwh.  Natural gas-fired turbines are at a hair over seven cents per kwh and coal is more than twice as expensive as wind.  The US now produces about 5% of its electricity from wind and we are the world's leader, measured in kilowatt hours.  Germany has a much bigger percentage coming from wind, but they are a much smaller market.  That battery breakthrough I've been promising for the last five years seems like it is about to produce a marketable product capable of efficiently powering a car.  That will allow us to start converting vehicles to wind-powered electricity.  Fill up your tank for 50 cents.  Sounds cheaper than oil to me.  All the whooping and hollering about green energy is beside the point.  We are already converting to wind power.  A feeder line to the Plains and Eastern Clean Line runs eight miles west of my house.  At the current rate, the US will be 20% wind powered by 2030, Trump notwithstanding.

So how did the idea that green costs more get started?  Some early experimental ideas were very expensive, like generating gasoline from switchgrass.  Those were the original prototypes.  Like comparing miles-per-gallon on a Model T with my wife's Honda.  If you were heavily invested in coal and it looked like wind was going to put coal out of business, you'd put out a lot of propaganda to protect your investment.  And that is what the Koch Brothers did and are doing.  Not only that, they have the best politicians money can buy.  You can find lists of which politicians cost how much on line.  So the Koch's oppose things that favor wind - like a new grid.  Just finding ways to conserve energy will save money.  Reinsulate your house; put weather-stripping around doors and windows; put a blanket (fiber-glass) around your water heater.  Spend a little - save a lot.  Conservation and conversion will save consumers money.

It's not just that some people in New York or London will have to live in a warmer climate - so will the people of the Sudan and Sahel.  The hottest places on earth are getting hotter.  That extra energy comes in all day, every day and it has to have a place to go.  In the short-term it produces weather changes as the weather system tries to redistribute the heat.  In the long run, it warms things up.  And those folks in New York and London eat beef grown in the US and Argentina, where temps are getting warmer and crop failures more common.  You are already paying for global warming at the super market.

How hot could it get?  James Hansen thought temps might approach the boiling point in 300 years or so.  But he made that forecast some years ago before we understood that temps aren't related to CO2 in a linear manner.  I don't know if anybody has re-run the numbers.  But at any rate, it won't be the temps that get us - it will be ecosystem collapse.  We keep killing off things, including things that keep us alive.  One of these days we'll kill off the wrong thing and we may do it years, even decades before we know we've done it; we might have done it already.

Damage as a result of climate change has been incremental.  It will probably remain so for quite some time.  But we have no way to know that.  The melt-off of the Arctic Ocean could be the event that entrains our eventual demise.  Or, it might be the methane gun doing it in a matter of months to a few years, or something we haven't even discovered yet.

In short, we are running a huge experiment to find out how much damage we can do to the ecosystem before it fails.  I hope we never learn the answer to that question.

Doug

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On ‎1‎/‎26‎/‎2017 at 9:10 PM, RefealN said:

What's pragmatic steps should take to cope with this?

Switch to wind.  The US could be nearly there by 2030.  And we could do it with private money if we could get the politicians out of our pockets.

By 2030 good batteries should be available for cars and we could start switching transportation over to wind.

 

Somebody is sure to ask:  what if the wind isn't blowing?  Somewhere in North America, the wind is always blowing, especially around here.  That's one reason we need a new grid system (Not to mention that the old one is wearing out).  Move power from where the wind is blowing to where it is needed.  By next year, Oklahoma wind will be powering Florida air conditioners.  The company doing this is Nextera, the parent company to Florida Light and Power.  Besides wind turbines, Nextera owns gas wells (some wind mills within site of the gas wells).  Electricity can easily be moved across the country, just by flipping a switch.  Wind power can light those Ohio River generator stations cheaper than they can do it themselves.

 

I am seeing a much-better future ahead if we can get to 2020 without starting WWIII.

Doug

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23 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

By 2030 good batteries should be available for cars and we could start switching transportation over to wind.

I didn't know this yesterday:  Tesla is building a huge plant in Nevada to make batteries for its new electric cars, of which they expect to be selling hundreds of thousands before 2020.  The batteries are about the size of a C-cell, but much more powerful.  They said they could produce batteries "faster than a machine gun can fire bullets."  This will be one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world.

Doug

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On 2/2/2017 at 5:03 PM, Doug1o29 said:

If you were heavily invested in coal and it looked like wind was going to put coal out of business, you'd put out a lot of propaganda to protect your investment.  And that is what the Koch Brothers did and are doing.  Not only that, they have the best politicians money can buy.  You can find lists of which politicians cost how much on line.  So the Koch's oppose things that favor wind - like a new grid.

 

Doug

I don't get this mentality of the people invested in coal and oil. If we look back at the people who literally built America,  Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they all have something in common. They started out in one thing and switched over to another and became the richest men in America and the world. Vanderbilt built a fleet of shipping boats, then sold them all when he saw that railroads would be the new way of shipping and put all his money into railroads. Rockefeller built his oil monopoly then when Edison and Tesla had their "War of Currents" he fought them with his own propaganda until he learned that a byproduct of oil, gasoline, was perfect for Fords new cars, so he switched and put his money into that. Carnegie was building bridges and needed a easier way to get steel, so he found it and put his money into that.

So way won't Koch follow the same path? It just makes sense to do what they did in the past. I don't understand why they fight green energy when they have the money to pioneer it and make billions. 

Edited by Odin11
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On 22/1/2017 at 7:36 AM, DieChecker said:

Isn't that 20 to 30 meters though? 20 to 30 feet wouldn't be quite as bad. Though Florida would still almost be gone. 

The video illustrates a sea level rise of approximately 60-70 meters. 

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On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 1:34 PM, Odin11 said:

So way won't Koch follow the same path? It just makes sense to do what they did in the past. I don't understand why they fight green energy when they have the money to pioneer it and make billions. 

I don't know.  It seems short-sighted of them not to diversify.  Nexterra is already using a wind/gas mix - they're an ENERGY company, not a coal or a gas or an oil or a wind company.  And MR. BIG OIL - T. Boone Pickens - owns a couple wind farms.

The people who sell you wind power are going to be mostly the same ones who now sell you coal or oil power.  Rather than trying to put them out of business, we should seek ways to work with them.

The animosity between preservationists and lumbermen got started when Teddy Roosevelt made a surprise hostile speech at a lumbering convention.  That set the tone between industry and conservation for over a century.  Lumbermen had the tools, equipment and incentive to practice good forestry.  What could have been accomplished had they not been alienated at the start?

Doug

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I think that is very true. The big Energy companies of the future will be the big Oil companies now. Kind of like the millions of small mom and pop video stores that popped everywhere in the 1980s, and then by the late 1990s, nothing but BlockBuster and Hollywood Video. Everyone else was gone. The big will always end up buying out the small.

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