What climate change is not

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by billvon, Jan 28, 2020.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So you still haven't read that article.
    You are doing a lot of work to avoid acknowledging that one solitary article - and there are hundreds to go, in the AGW field. It's a hot topic.

    But that's not as silly as thinking there is no science or research until after I refer to it. I assure you I have no such powers of creation - there is a great deal of science and research beyond what I have referred to, including in the fields of AGW and related concerns, and you are capable of denying any or all of it.
    It is accelerating today. If it remains like today, it will remain in acceleration.
    Your borders have nothing to do with the fact that there will be little or no warning at the the thresholds the article reported. Your "explanation" has nothing to do with those thresholds, or "my" warning (it's not mine - it's the researchers's - another example of your frequent denial of the science and research around AGW).
    You got the aridity wrong also, but getting the concept of the threshold so badly confused is what has prevented you from
    That doesn't matter.
    Valid or invalid, it was a response to your claims about funding pressure. You made many claims about funding pressure, all of them ridiculously wrong - you got the direction of the funding pressure, if any, backwards, because you were relying on the US rightwing propaganda feed for your facts, and once you had done that you had no hope of posting sense.

    Now you are denying even making those claims. My prediction is that soon you will be making them again - on any given issue of contention the US rightwing propaganda feed often cycles among a set of claims in turn, much as it cycles among its pundits and spokesmen as they make themselves odious and despised and have to give people time enough to forget, and that one will come 'round again in a little while when the stank has sublimated.
    The article warns us about the likelihood of sudden changes over large regions at once. No fixed points, no borders, nothing like that is involved.
    You should read it, not just quote it - you don't learn anything by cut and paste.
    Crossing in either direction would be your interpretation, not mine. You are now forgetting your own posts here.
    Your interpretation also assumed that the 20% included all the regions that had become significantly more arid - the "n" were experiencing small changes, and the "80-n" were getting significantly wetter, in your explicit description.
    That is not what the article said.
    I wonder why you put so much effort into inventing silly crap, instead of reading what's in front of you and replying to the posts of other people as they are written.
    Not much, true, but I do wonder about that a little.
    You have never encountered anything like the thresholds discovered by those researchers and reported in that article you have yet to read. They are new to you, and you don't understand them at all.
    For example, you throw in "at a given point" - in your post, right there, see it? I bolded it for you. Earlier you were posting about "boundaries" and "borders" and the like.
    If you had read the article, if you had any idea what they were talking about as a "threshold", you would not have done that.
     
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  3. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Schmelzer

    NEWS:
    4/4/2020
    Delhi capital of India recorded 109.6mm (4.3inches) of rain in March 2020
    589% more than the long term average and the wettest March on record.
    The previous record was set in 1915 with a mere 62.2mm (2.4inches)
    src: The Watchers.
    Increased precipitation is indeed predicted ...as a consequence of AGW
    I wonder what will happen next year?
     
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  5. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    But if the projections for climate change are correct, China would be almost uninhabitable anyway whether it goes to war or not. If you believe Russia is willing to sacrifice itself in nuclear war to protect a sparsely-populated wasteland it plundered from China in the first place, and assuming that climate change makes Siberia more habitable as you clearly expect, why wouldn't 1.3 billion Chinese be willing to do the same when they have virtually nowhere else to go?
     
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  7. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    So you still have not understood your elementary error in understanding this article.
    LOL, that misinterpretation of my quote made my day. There is, of course, a lot of research, but I don't deny it if I name your unfounded claims alarmist and reject them. If you support your claims with explicit quotes from peer-reviewed literature (as I have done, for example, in http://localhost/climate/methane.php ), then I will change my position and, with quite high probability, accept the particular claim you have supported. If alarmists can support their claims based on scientific literature, then they have a point. You have, up to now, no such points.
    Learn to read. The original mentioned explicitly what remains like today, and "it" was not that clown of Steven King, and it was not the acceleration, but the rate of the rise, 3 mm per year.
    The word "warning" is in the paper only once, in the following phrase in the conclusions:
    which does not support your fantasy at all, and I have not found also anything else supporting your fantasy. Feel free to quote the relevant phrases which support your claim.

    Just to clarify again, there will be indeed little or no warning at a given point in space itself. The early warning will be that the border toward the more arid ecosystem moves toward the place. It depends, of course, on the particular circumstances what is a dangerous distance to such a border. Moreover, local catastrophic events like extreme wildfires can create large shifts - if the region is already close enough to the threshold. But the point remains, there will be warnings. Go to the borders between those ecosystems, and observe if they shift, and in which direction. Then follow the direction and you have found the regions in danger of crossing the relevant threshold in near future.

    This is a quite general method. You have some gradient in space of the relevant parameter (aridity in the paper, temperature in the mountains). This is something you can measure now. You can also look at the ecosystems you see now, and study them. Then, if you want to predict the near future, given some change in time in the relevant parameter now, go to the point of interest A, compare the speed of change in time of the parameter $\dot{p}$ with its local change in space $\nabla p$, compute the resulting speed, 1 year of change corresponds to x km in the particular gradient direction in space. Then, if you want to predict the future in y years, compute: y years of change corresponds to xy km in the particular gradient direction in space. Go and see what you have there on the ground. And this will be, plausibly, a quite good first approximation. Not?

    And you can use this method to get a prediction when the threshold will cause a sudden change of the ecosystem at a given point A.
    LOL, the next really funny thing. It does not matter at all what was my actual argument (which you have misinterpreted, intentionally or because you are too stupid is secondary). It matters that according to your fantasy about my sources I can use only those sources, and these source use only the argument that you have refuted. So, you must have refuted my argument. ROTFL.

    I do not "deny" (which presupposes that I have really made them), I have simply never made such claims. Feel free to prove, with explicit quote and link, that I have made them, liar.
    It becomes even funnier. The guy who has not quoted anything in support of his claims blames me for "just quoting" it, but claims I have not read it. Read the article yourself, and give at least some evidence that you have done this by quoting something which supports your claims. So, I'm waiting for a quote of an explicit warning of the likelihood of sudden changes over large regions at once.
    Maybe "reading" in iceaura's English means inventing some fantasies about a text?
    Let's start with what the article said:
    It is not explicitly said that these are the cases crossed in the direction of more aridity. Nonetheless, I assume from the context that this is what is claimed. Whatever, I'm also open to the other interpretation that both directions of crossing are included into the 22%. Nonetheless, this number in itself gives not that much about the question if my own expectations are falsified - which is what you have claimed. Once I naively expect that more precipitation leads also to more places becoming wetter that becoming more arid (which is a falsifiable hypothesis) the numbers to compare would be the part of the area crossing the thresholds into the more arid direction with that crossing it into the more wet direction. While this would not be the same hypothesis, it would be nonetheless a nearby hypothesis which is equally plausible. Once only one number is given, the other not, the data provided by the article are not sufficient to falsify my hypothesis.
    The "silly crap" is what prevents me from being played by alarmists. So, above I have "invented" (no, its not really an invention, I would say that I have learned it in my childhood in the mountains) a method to predict the future given a rate of change in time of the relevant parameter and having all the data we can observe on the ground now. Any scientific objections against that method (beyond the trivial one that it gives only an approximation)? And in the particular case of the unknown n% it was necessary to explain you what would be a falsification of my assumptions.
     
  8. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    I simply apply the method I have described above in #384. If applied to the mountains, and cooling, then I can see how the things will change during a cooling by going up in the mountains. And what happens in this case I have seen. There were several such thresholds, clearly visible. I have not made large trips in drylands, so all I can present is a picture out of a bus, and, of course, only from such a border in space:

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    I have an idea, and I would have done this. Based on the method I use described in #384 how to make conclusions about the future given an actual speed of change and the gradients existing in the actual world. The method is simple to apply for laymen, and allows them not to be fooled by alarmists.

    Who cares about alarmist projections made by CptBork?
    Fine.
    Yes. There is no disagreement about this.
     
  9. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    How about that percentage of uninhabitable mountains or arid soils which can't support vegetation. Deduct those areas from your model and that 22% might go up to 50% of habitable lands, and try to cram 72 % of mobile populations of humans and animals into 50 % of livable areas.
    A lot of death follows....

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  10. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah Schmelzer seems to think that it only takes rain to covert desert in to arable land
     
  11. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    They're not my projections. They're projections made by real climate scientists with real publications that get cited by real peers, rather than only receiving citations from themselves and their imaginary friends. You're the one who thinks blocking out the sun with nuclear winter is a viable solution for the planet if it gets a little too hot in Moscow, and you call me alarmist?
     
  12. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    Another iceaura who claims the existence of mystical AGW scientists but gives no quotes from peer-reviewed papers to support his alarmist fantasies?
    That is, indeed, the most important thing actually. There are very large territories completely uninhabitable because they have no rain at all. Enough rain alone would, indeed, be sufficient to make them inhabitable.
    There is, of course, also some temperature range required. The mountainous areas which are really uninhabitable are, of course, the highest mountains. Despite being close to the equator, Mt. Everest will be far too cold for agriculture.
    How about them? They are uninhabitated already today and therefore irrelevant. Some of the arid parts can become inhabitable if there will be, as promised, more precipitation. If not, nothing changes.
    LOL. There is some country with a population density of more than 500 per $km^2$. Thus, ten times of the world average of 50 per $km^2$. People are not at all starving there, instead, they export food, and a lot of it, they are one of the leading exporters of food in the whole world. They had the possibility to gain some large additional territory for agriculture - as was planned some time before, and realized in part. They did not use it, but left at that place a big lake. There simply was, in their opinion, no point in gaining more territory for agriculture.
     
  13. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    I have no reason to believe any of that...
    Most of Australia is arid and semi arid and even if rain was plentiful would still remain useless for farming. The quality of the soil is so poor from millions of years of ...uhm... arid-ness.....lol
    Please explain how rain alone can miraculously generate a reasonable agricultural soil without taking millions of years to do so.
    High salinity, rising salivation, huge evaporation rates, mostly sand with little organics.. throws your hypothesis our the window.
    Converting salt plains to agriculture just because it rains... is what you are suggesting... (sarc)

    It is like as if you think that if it rained on the moon, the moon would turn green... in a couple of seasons....
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2020
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    El Centro was a barren desert. Then they built a canal, and now it's one of the most fertile areas in California. Took about ten years.
     
  15. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    yes we have also areas that have been terraformed but the investment is huge and take a hell of a lot more than just water...
     
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Definitely. It takes a lot of construction, farmers, fertilizer and tractors.
     
  17. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    First, let's note that the whole question of the existence of soils unusable for agriculture is irrelevant for the question of climate alarmism. If some soil cannot be used for agriculture now, then for this soil climate change is not a problem - whatever the new climate, there will be no loss for agriculture.
    Rain alone? Of course, some human influence is necessary too. The trivial and obvious one is named "fertilizers".
    Read about methods of desalination, Wikipedia level information seems sufficient to meet your alarmism. The most important one would be flushing or leaching.

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    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaching_model_(soil)#Leaching_requirement the most important thing one needs for this is - water. As initially, to bring down the soil salinity to an acceptable level:
    The other possibility is to use salt-tolerant crops. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity#Salt_tolerance_of_crops for some examples. Examples there go from 2.4 dS/m to 15.5 dS/m. Last but not least, one can use is as coarse natural pasture, say, for the rearing of bulls. In this case, the choice of the grasses able to survive the salt level is made by nature.
    And there is also some amount of water necessary beyond what the crops need to preserve the level: If the water is used completely by the crops, then even small amounts of salt in the irrigation water, together with some evaporation, will increase the salt content. A higher amount of water will, instead, wash out the salt and move it to some other place. So, with enough water one can in a few years decrease the salt content to acceptable levels, and then maintain that level.

    A successful example can be found in the Netherlands. They have gained soil from the North Sea. How to do this? Build a big dike. Make sure that the water on the land side of the dike can flow out into the sea, and that some freshwater inflow comes from some river. Then the saltwater lake becomes a freshwater lake. And that freshwater lake will also dissolve the salt deposited in the ground near the surface. Later you pump out the water and use it for agriculture.

    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia the problem is mainly caused by incompetent irrigation and other recent human failure. Of course, behind this failure is that there is a large deficit of water.

    BTW, given that the main method to get rid of salt is to wash it out, those horrible heavy rains which will give too much water during some time may become quite useful to do this job, if appropriately used (which may require appropriate infrastructure like drainage - but I have never questioned that a climate change requires adaptation).
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2020
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Yep.
    You don't know any better, because you don't know anything about AGW.
    Yes, you do.
    Because they aren't unfounded claims. They are simply reports of the research findings. When you "name" them (illiterately) alarmist, you are labeling the research claims "alarmist" - denying them. You don't know that, because you don't know what the research findings and claims about AGW are.
    If you bothered to read any of the research, you would discover this for yourself.
    So? The paper's findings are what they are. They warn. If it warns it's a warning, no?
    One of the findings is that over at least 20% of the land area of the planet the transition from one ecological regime to another is expected to be sudden and without notice. There will be no approaching boundary, no visible border, nothing of the kind.
    Your method doesn't work for the thresholds involved in AGW. You can find out why by reading about the research being done.
    Meanwhile: You don't know anything about the rate of change, or the gradients involved, in AGW. Your "conclusions" deny the research and findings and science as reported by the AGW researchers in the field via peer reviewed articles in scientific journals. Your "arguments" led you to conclusions contrary to the discovered facts and findings, contrary to the science - where do you think you went wrong?
    It doesn't work for the thresholds discovered by those researchers. In the first place they are not ecological boundaries or borders, but thresholds - so your method probably does not even apply (and certainly needs some kind of justification). In the second place, you have no idea who or what is "alarmist" in this area, because you have no idea what the solid research has discovered. It's not "alarmist" if it's the simple facts of the matter.
    No, there were not.
    Again: Those are not thresholds, as discovered by AGW researchers and reported in that paper. The article's major finding was those three thresholds, and your ecological borders and boundaries are irrelevant - not the same kind of thing.

    You keep trying to change the subject to these borders and boundaries of ecological zones you happen to know about, or think you know about. You should instead read the article I referred to you, or some other report of AGW research and findings in this matter. Like most AGW research it is very informative. You could learn a lot, about a critical issue you apparently have never encountered until now.
     
  19. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    So you think that this method described in #384 is inherently wrong, makes no sense at all? Or that it gives simply bad approximation? Or what is your justification for such a negative reaction to such a simple method? Please describe these justifications. Else it follows that you don't know what is wrong with this method, and your rejection is based on nothing but that you don't like the results.
    Feel free to prove this. As long as you don't support this with explicit quotes from those research findings, they are nothing but iceaura's claims. Given the 100% failure to describe correctly what I have written, there is a similar probability that you correctly describe the research results even if you have really read some research. In fact, all you read are alarmist publications, and you even repeat the typical argumentation of alarmists. They also claim all the time that their claims are supported by science, you know, that 97% majority. But only very seldom refer to actual research papers. Like you.
    Learn to read. To "put the focus on identifying potential catastrophic shifts and early warning indicators for them" is not to warn. It means that the potential catastrophic shifts have not even been identified yet, so there is nothing yet to warn about.
    Don't lie about the content of a paper you obviously have not read. (Else you would have either started to quote the relevant things from the paper, or at least stopped to make such obviously wrong claims.
    No, I cannot, because it works for those thresholds too. In the same way.
    Feel free to prove this. After you have successfully proven this, I will start to think about where I went wrong.
    Different from you, I have read the paper. I'm the one who has quoted it, and the one who was able to support the own claims with quotes from the literature.
    Of course, as I have said many times, the thresholds describe the dependence of the ecosystems on relevant parameters (aridity, temperature and so on). The borders appear in space, on the ground, at (ok, near) the places where the relevant parameters have the threshold values. So, they are obviously not the same thing. But they have a close connection, and one can use these borders to identify such thresholds. Simply measure the relevant climate parameters in a fine enough grid on the ground, then identify the ecosystems on the ground, and connect the data - identifying the ecosystems which are viable for the various sets of relevant parameters.
    As explained, I have good reasons to insist that my method described in #384 is, at least as an approximation, is a good starting point. If it would have weak points (every approximation has such weak points, so there should be some) I would be interested to learn about them. (One weak point I know, it appears if the scale is too large. Plants as well as animals may have problems crossing large barriers like oceans or high mountains, so that if on the other side there appears a new area with optimal conditions for an ecosystem on this side, all parts may not succeed to come through that barrier so that what there appears will be something very different. But in this case humans can easily help as long as it is in their interest.)

    The method is important because it is easily accessible to laymen. And allows them to defend themselves against panicking and alarmism by thinking themselves. You know, that Kantian idea of "Sapere aude":
    Iceaura's approach is the opposite one. People should believe what self-proclaimed priests like iceaura tell the community about the results found by Holy Science. Anyone who doubts their Authority and asks them to prove that what they claim is really supported by science will be attacked personally as a denier, as too stupid to understand science, and so on, but his request will remain unanswered.

    The approach of any scientist would be different. He would not care about the one who asks, but would start to explain what science has found, and how, if necessary in a lot of detail, often even too much detail. But he explains the methods used by science and the results they have reached to the laymen, as simple as possible, allowing them thereby to make their own judgement if these methods, and the results obtained in this way, are good enough to convince them.
     
  20. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    You act as if these AGW scientists aren't screaming at the top of their lungs to every political body that's willing to listen. Maybe I'll eventually find you specific papers and quote relevant sections, maybe I won't find it worth the time since you're not actually here on these forums for the purpose of learning and being convinced of anything.

    The point I'm trying to make to you is that if you think Russia will benefit from global warming while other nations like China suffer, or if everyone suffers but Russia suffers less, there will be a lot of powerful people with nothing to lose who've already come close to engaging in nuclear wars in the past, and if Russia's willing to use nukes to protect its spoils in Siberia despite hardly doing anything with the territory at present, there's no reason China wouldn't do the same when they have nowhere else to go. Thus you might want to reconsider your position on this issue because it's as much in your interest to act as it is in everyone else's.
     
  21. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    The naivity!!
    Some how you expect people who can barely write their own name or read to somehow learn how to terraform vast areas on the fly.
    Somehow you think that fertilizer is all you need and that there is enough fertilizer sitting on the shelves to do the job.
    The list goes on...
    Surely you push your optimism to the limit?

    Most systems of management are tentative, easily destabilized, sensitive to anomalies, take little to bring into chaos, far from robust, weakened by unknowable's etc...

    The ecological equilibrium takes very little sudden change to lose stability. The impact of losing that equilibrium even slightly is unknown but it is known that even the smallest of sudden, artificially generated changes can have unpredictable and severe impacts. Impacts that have ongoing and devastating impacts on the future of that ecology.
    For examples of unanswerable questions:
    ** Today's News ABC (au).

    Most successful farming has very little tolerance for deviations, and any of such will and most likely bring significant damage to production capacity etc.
    Ocean ecology can be extremely sensitive to rapid changes such as temperature and CO2 uptake.
    What answers does your Crystal ball called "Optimism" tell you?
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2020
  22. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    Your choice. I do not care about those who are screaming at the top of their lungs to every political body that's willing to listen. For the simple reason that this is not the typical behavior of scientists, but, instead, of alarmists. Are there some scientists among them? Possibly. So what. I leave the study of Greta's FFF kindergarden to sociologists.

    It is, of course, your decision if you want to support your claims with scientific evidence or not.

    I like this discussion because I have learned a lot. Of course, not by learning from the posts of the alarmists, who give almost nothing, except the information that they have no counterarguments. But I do some research answering their attempts to make objections. And this is the part where I learn a lot of interesting things. Say, salination. I had not cared about it completely, if something is salty and there unusable today it remain unusable, so why one would care. But, once provoked, I thought, so what let's look what can be done with salty soil in some arid region where climate change gives us more rain. Just for information. It appears, a lot can be done. Desalination of soil is a procedure already done at many places, a few years are sufficient to improve the situation essentially, all one needs for this is - you guess - more water. So I was wrong thinking that such salty deserts are anyway unusable because of the salt - with enough rain, problems with salt will be solved together with the salt. That's not deep scientific research, but Wikipedia level collection of elementary information, but so what, I have learned something, corrected an own error, and gained even a new argument against the alarmists, namely another positive effect of more precipitation. I found this worth to write <a href="https://ilja-schmelzer.de/climate/desalination.php">another page against the climate hysteria</a>.

    Same for the issue with sea level rise. I was aware about the negligible actual increase of 3 mm per year and therefore did not care much. Once provoked, I learned a lot more, in particular that even Greenland melting completely gives not that much increase, 7.2 m, that's all. And even together with the whole Antarctica the increase will be only 66 m. Moreover, this comes only after a lot of millenia. Then I tried to find out if it would be possible to protect the whole of the Netherlands even against these 66 m. It appeared quite unproblematic. The new element, that one would have to pump the water arriving there via the Rhein river into the sea, appeared to be cheap enough to be affordable. Then I looked at the even more rigorous possibility to protect the whole Baltic Sea from the increase by cutting its connection with the North Sea. It did not look unsolvable too, even with actual technologies - no need for new technologies during the next several thousand years, imagine. The map of the Earth in the worst case of 66 m sea level rise was also interesting. See <a href="https://ilja-schmelzer.de/climate/sea-level.php">this page</a>.
    Point understood, but rejected as nonsensical given that I do not share at all your prediction for the fate of China during climate change.
    Don't cry. Let's see: Ok, I have not expected that the level of general education in Australia has been going down that fast that even the leading personal of modern agricultural firms can barely read now. But don't worry, such things can be raised again. This does not depend on climate change, but on the system of education. Or do you think that the fate of some small farms led by some illiterates matters for the next centuries? Sorry, but they will be anyway destroyed by the standard urbanization process. Then, it does not matter where the fertilizers are sitting around, what matters is that one can buy them in the necessary amount.
    The point being? Such is life. Grow up if you are panicked by such things. As a theoretical physicist, I'm working in an area where we have 99.9% certainty of failure for the individual scientist. But this does not even diminish the certainty that science will nonetheless progress because a single successful scientist is sufficient for this. In comparison, farming is much more safe. And we don't have to care about the fate of the unfortunate farmers who go bankrupt. It is sufficient that the successful farmers deliver enough food, that's all.
    Ecology is a highly ideological science. Of course, it gives a lot of interesting information, as it should if it is science. But the general answer is quite simple: If one ecosystem is destroyed, another one will take over. Big deal. My Crystal ball called "Optimism" tells me to read the even the articles posted by alarmists because one often can extract useful information even from such propaganda. In this case, we read in the article you linked to suggest that all the corals will die because of bleaching the following observation:
    So, this guy was astonished by the speed of these changes. I'm not astonished, because this is what my Crystal ball has told me before.
    All one has to do is to take such aside information which does not really fit into the ideology more serious than the parts supporting the ideology.
    By construction. Not of Nature, but of this science named ecology. One could compare it with history. It describes quite large societies of different species. As human empires, they are impressive but unstable and don't survive for long. The end of such empires is usually not a picture of happiness of the people involved. But humanity survives, it changes, and new societies will be created. So, if climate changes, many ecological systems will be destroyed. But other, new ecological systems will be created. Similar to history, ecology cannot tell us anything about these new systems. So, all it can tell us is the actual state of those complex systems, and that these particular systems will be destroyed in near future. Moreover, even history is much more optimistic, given that all the locals in existing empires like to write about the history of their empire becoming great. There is no such optimistic part of the history of those ecosystems we have now becoming as great as they are now, destroying a lot of other ecosystems (which will never be studied by ecologists), during their successful time. That's simply because those heroic corals don't write optimistic papers in ecology journals. Ecology studies only decline, by construction. So, one has to care if one takes a whining ecologist seriously.

    This does not mean that one should not care at all about what they say. Say, a serious decline in the number of existing species is nothing good, and something worth to care about.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    It is a highly mathematical branch of biology - often criticized on those grounds.
    All that crap is irrelevant to this thread. I react negatively to your attempts to change the subject, especially when you try to shoehorn Republican Party propaganda into the discussion.
    The shifts were identified in the article (as they have been elsewhere, btw, in the research and findings concerning AGW). They were the central finding and most significant matter reported - with graphs, specific numbers, explicit analysis, etc. The warnings and implications were perfectly clear. How did you miss them?
    You won't. (How do I know? You haven't).
    You would have to inform yourself about the research and findings concerning AGW, and like all US Republican media feed purveyors you will continue to refuse to do that.
    It doesn't. Those are thresholds, your attempted deflection was into the boundaries you have seen on mountains and the like - a completely different matter, not involving thresholds (that word "too" was dishonesty, btw - you once demanded examples, remember? ).
    The article you are attempting to avoid deals with thresholds, including defining the ones of interest. Until you begin to deal with the central matter and most significant findings of that article, none of your "methods" (your assertions and false claims) will apply.
    True.
    (Except for the "if" - the climate is already changed, and will continue to change until it reaches a new equilibrium - the current expected timeline runs into many hundreds of years, quite possibly thousands).
    The destructions will be rapid, according to the findings of the AGW researchers. The new creations will take a long time, according the the findings of researchers into those events.
    After the disaster of AGW, regardless of how severe we allow it to be and how little we do to mitigate it, the biological world will (probably, unless we touch off the methane bomb) restore itself to complexity and verdancy after a while. How long that takes will depend on how bad things got. If the land surface has to be repopulated with newly evolved beings from the midoceanic ridges, it will take many millions of years. That carries a low - but not infinitesimal - probability (as far as we know). More likely, a few thousand years will suffice - a couple of hundred human generations - even if we let things get out of hand. Is that reassuring to you?

    To me, from the perspective of human civilization, the high probability of a future recreation of ecological complexity is not all that comforting - as a human being I confess to a certain bias toward civilization, agriculture, and wilderness, more or less as we enjoy them today; maybe even better (!). And that - according to the findings of the researchers in the field now - is under serious threat.
     

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