Climate Change - Impacts, Part II

Yes. The graphic is like 3 posts up. Look for yourself.

Yes. The graphic is like 3 posts up. Look for yourself.[/quote]

I can sense fred’s doublethink machine grinding its gears over this one :slight_smile:

No, Fred is having exceptions to the “weeping” that was going on. First, at least to me, it sounded as if, the entire GBR was dead due to bleaching. Now, we get the usual gradations and such. This has happened twice before. Still waiting to hear how the reef “recovered” enough to be bleached all over again. Vay? Weren’t you going to look into that and provide something. Finally, I think that it is a great idea to sink sculptures to create a new reef. WHAT A GOOD IDEA!

Dude. 93% of the whole reef is bleached. I just did the numbers, and 65% is severely bleached, basically meaning, the colony is dead.

Already told you, last time it was 50-60% bleached… but only 5% severely. This time it’s 93% bleached and 65% severely. That is a HUGE difference. And I think you are well aware coral can recover, given time, but as I said before, El Niños are coming on stronger and more frequently. When this last one killed 65% of the colony, what do you think the chances are before the next, probably even bigger El Niño hits?

I don’t believe you are really interested, but just in case, here is a good resource to read on the topic of reef recovery:

reefresilience.org/coral-ree … -recovery/

I am interested in sinking sculptures to build new reefs. We need to pay more artists to develop important works of art to be sunk to exhibit our concern for this important issue.

Here’s something interesting from Scientific American:

"Forty-seven percent of conservatives now say the climate is changing, a leap of 19 points since the midterm elections of 2014, "

They didn’t ask if it was caused by people, but they said,

“Despite the change, the findings don’t point to a shift in conservative views on the reasons behind warming. There hasn’t been a rise in the number of Republicans who believe that people are causing climate change.”

scientificamerican.com/artic … te-change/

And you are surprised about this? Heck, most of them don’t even believe in evolution. Plus, AGW denialism has become part of their core tribal identity. Not to mention, if they admit they’ve been conducting an underhanded PR campaign against reality all this time, some might wonder whether they might not have some culpability in the damage that might have been averted. If that ever happens, I nominate the George C Marshall Institute - and that goddamn, lying, immortal asshole Fred Singer in particular as the first targets.

Yet another reason why it will be hard to get more action.

Antarcticbeech: Stop! The world had one perfect climate and that was in 1956 or 1895 or 1990 and the changes mean that it is no longer perfect. IF you persist in this unhelpful attitude, others may choose not to fund my NGO and I need to go to Rio. Beats the hell out of working at Kmart!

Freudian slip?

Now, step away from the computer. Turn off the Internet. Go find someone or something productive to do. Breathe… deep breaths… None of this matters.

Ah, the Candide argument. Change happens, and although such changes may appear superficially catastrophic, all is for the best, because God’s creation cannot be anything other than the Best Of All Possible Worlds.

I thought fred had reached the bottom of his barrel of arguments ages ago, but he’s now knocked a hole in the bottom and is digging in the dirt underneath.

I said immortal because the bastard just won’t die. As much as I’d love him to see how much harm he has had a hand in, he’s one of those people that the world would really just be better off without.

As far as one perfect climate, it’s a range obviously, but like I said, the period in which human civilization developed has had a pretty stable climate - probably not by coincidence.

Please do not pretend to understand books that you have not read less understood. Please. I beg of you.

I’ve read it. I thought it was poorly-written. Too bizarre to be taken halfway seriously, even as fiction, nevermind social commentary.

Of course, I’m obviously not as erudite as fred smith, so presumably I completely missed the point.

I've read it. I thought it was poorly-written.

Do not hyphenate adverbs ending in “ly.”

:ponder:

:s

Sounds like this writer has Vay and Finley in mind… Read on… tsk tsk tsk…

[quote]There was a breathtakingly beautiful BBC series on the Great Barrier Reef recently which my son pronounced himself almost too depressed to watch. ‘What’s the point?’ said Boy. ‘By the time I get to Australia to see it the whole bloody lot will have dissolved.’ The menace Boy was describing is ‘ocean acidification’. It’s no wonder he should find it worrying, for it has been assiduously promoted by environmentalists for more than a decade now as ‘global warming’s evil twin’. Last year, no fewer than 600 academic papers were published on the subject, so it must be serious, right? First referenced in a peer-reviewed study in Nature in 2003, it has since been endorsed by scientists from numerous learned institutions including the Royal Society, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the IPCC. Even the great David Attenborough — presenter of the Great Barrier Reef series — has vouched for its authenticity: ‘If the temperature rises up by two degrees and the acidity by a measurable amount, lots of species of coral will die out. Quite what happens then is anybody’s guess. But it won’t be good.’ No indeed. Ocean acidification is the terrifying threat whereby all that man-made CO2 we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere may react with the sea to form a sort of giant acid bath. First it will kill off all the calcified marine life, such as shellfish, corals and plankton. Then it will destroy all the species that depend on it — causing an almighty mass extinction which will wipe out the fishing industry and turn our oceans into a barren zone of death. Or so runs the scaremongering theory. The reality may be rather more prosaic. Ocean acidification — the evidence increasingly suggests — is a trivial, misleadingly named, and not remotely worrying phenomenon which has been hyped up beyond all measure for political, ideological and financial reasons.

Some of us have suspected this for some time. According to Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, long one of ocean acidification theory’s fiercest critics, the term is ‘just short of propaganda’.
The pH of the world’s oceans ranges between 7.5 and 8.3 — well above the acid zone (which starts below ‘neutral’ pH7) — so more correctly it should be stated that the seas are becoming slightly less alkaline. ‘Acid’ was chosen, Moore believes, because it has ‘strong negative connotations for most people’.
Matt Ridley, too, has been scathing on the topic. In The Rational Optimist he wrote, ‘Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm.’ I agree. That’s why I like to call it the alarmists’ Siegfried Line — their last redoubt should it prove, as looks increasingly to be the case, that the man-made global warming theory is a busted flush. To the alarmist camp, of course, this is yet further evidence that ‘deniers’ are heartless, anti-scientific conspiracy theorists who don’t read peer-reviewed papers and couldn’t give a toss if the world’s marine life is dissolved in a pool of acid due to man’s selfishness and greed. Unfortunately for the doom-mongers, we sceptics have just received some heavy fire-support from a neutral authority.

Howard Browman, a marine scientist for 35 years, has published a review in the ICES Journal of Marine Science of all the papers published on the subject. His verdict could hardly be more damning. The methodology used by the studies was often flawed; contrary studies suggesting that ocean acidification wasn’t a threat had sometimes had difficulty finding a publisher.
There was, he said, an ‘inherent bias’ in scientific journals which predisposed them to publish ‘doom and gloom stories’.
Ocean acidification theory appears to have been fatally flawed almost from the start. In 2004, two NOAA scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine, produced a chart showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels. But then, just over a year ago, Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with 30 years’ experience, noticed while researching his PhD that they had omitted some key information. Their chart only started in 1988 but, as Wallace knew, there were records dating back to at least 100 years before.
So why had they ignored the real-world evidence in favour of computer-modelled projections?

When Wallace plotted a chart of his own, incorporating all the available data, covering the period from 1910 to the present, his results were surprising: there has been no reduction in oceanic pH levels in the last -century. Even if the oceans were ‘acidifying’, though, it wouldn’t be a disaster for a number of reasons — as recently outlined in a paper by Patrick Moore for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. First, marine species that calcify have survived through millions of years when CO2 was at much higher levels; second, they are more than capable of adapting — even in the short term — to environmental change; third, seawater has a large buffering capacity which prevents dramatic shifts in pH; fourth, if oceans do become warmer due to ‘climate change’, the effect will be for them to ‘outgas’ CO2, not absorb more of it. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Moore quotes a killer analysis conducted by Craig Idso of all the studies which have been done on the effects of reduced pH levels on marine life. The impact on calcification, metabolism, growth, fertility and survival of calcifying marine species when pH is lowered up to 0.3 units (beyond what is considered a plausible reduction this century) is beneficial, not damaging. Marine life has nothing whatsoever to fear from ocean acidification.

Given all this, you might well ask why our learned institutions, government departments and media outlets have put so much effort into pretending otherwise.
Why, between 2009 and 2014, did Defra spend a whopping £12.5 million on an ocean acidification research programme when the issue could have been resolved, for next to nothing, after a few hours’ basic research?
To those of us who have been studying the global warming scare in some detail, the answer is depressingly obvious.
It’s because in the last decade or so, the climate change industry has become so vast and all encompassing, employing so many people, it simply cannot be allowed to fail.


According to a report last year by Climate Change Business Journal, it’s now worth an astonishing $1.5 trillion
— about the same as the online shopping industry. If the scare goes away, then all bets are off, because the entire global decarbonisation business relies on it. The wind parks, the carbon sequestration projects, the solar farms, the biomass plantations — none of these green schemes make any kind of commercial sense unless you buy into the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is catastrophically warming the planet and that radical green measures, enforced by governmental regulation, must be adopted to avert it. It’s no coincidence that the ocean acidification narrative began in the early 2000s — just as it was beginning to dawn on the climate alarmists that global temperatures weren’t going to plan. While CO2 levels were continuing to rise, temperatures weren’t. Hence the need for a fallback position — an environmental theory which would justify the massively expensive and disruptive ongoing decarbonisation programme so assiduously championed by politicians, scientists, green campaigners and anyone making money out of the renewables business. Ocean acidification fitted the bill perfectly. Does this prove that global warming is not a problem? No it doesn’t. What it does do is lend credence to something we much-maligned sceptics have long been saying: that in many environmental fields, the science is being abused and distorted to promote a political and financial agenda. Perhaps it’s about time our supposed ‘conspiracy theories’ were taken more seriously.[/quote]

spectator.co.uk/2016/04/ocea … -alarmism/

The irony is that this industry is now massively larger than any ExxonMobil but its adherents refuse to see how they are being played and for precisely the reason they attribute to the oil/gas industry… to keep generating those profits… profits INDEED! $1.5 TRILLION in business! MASSIVE!

TL;DR.

The reef is still dead. Why is anybody arguing about pH values? Are these idiots actually saying “reality doesn’t fit our theories, therefore reality is wrong”?

And what is inherently wrong with an industry sector being massive? Nobody complains about Cargill being massive. If the world is seriously attempting to switch over to new energy systems, it’s pretty much inevitable that the economic activity is going to be, you know, kinda big.

Believe it or not, I did actually agonise over that hyphen. However, rules for hyphenation go in and out of fashion depending on where and when you live. So if that’s your entire contribution to the debate, consider yourself dismissed to the grammar (or punctuation) nazi thread.

[quote=“Fred Smith”]Sounds like this writer has Vay and Finley in mind… Read on… tsk tsk tsk…
[/quote]

Great, more outlying opinions from a handful of cherry-picked contrarians. Denialism 101. Now how about telling us - except for because it makes you feel smug - why we should believe these guys, over the consensus of experts on the subject? Which says nothing like this.

And assume there is a small but non-existant chance these contrarians are right. Ok, great. The future cannot be known with certainty. Is it really wise to conduct this one-off, uncontrolled chemistry experiment on the oceans of our one and only planet?

I love this bit:

It is incontrovertible that oceans ARE becoming warmer due to climate change, so this “if” is weasel language, and in any case, what is the consequence: oceans outgasing CO2 back into the atmosphere means more warming! (This is also why efforts to sequester CO2 back from the air are also probably doomed, since lowing the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will just suck more of it up out of the oceans… and there is already a LOT of our CO2 dissolved in the oceans.)

This debunking isn’t directed at Fred’s article, but an older one making the same points:

Ask the real experts about ocean acidification, not climate science deniers

Regarding Moore himself:

[quote]The Australian described Patrick Moore as a “co-founder and former leader of Greenpeace” and “chair of ecology, energy and prosperity with Canada’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy”.

Moore left Greenpeace almost 30 years ago. Greenpeace says he wasn’t a founder, but he was around in the early days. Moore took his job at the Frontier Centre – a Canadian “free market” think tank that doesn’t reveal its funders – in late 2014.[/quote]

Regarding the 2005 conspiracy to create ocean acidification:

[quote]Moore tells the Australian’s readers that around the year 2005 “ocean acidification was invented to provide yet another apocalyptic scenario” because, according to Moore, global warming had stopped (it hasn’t).

It’s a conspiracy, you see.

Professor Christopher Langdon, of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami, has been working on ocean acidification and its impacts on marine life since the late 1990s. Was the science he was working on in the late 90s really invented half a decade later?

The research on the effects of Ocean Acidification on corals and coral reefs began much earlier (than 2005). Kleypas et al 1999 Science, Langdon et al 2000 Global Biogeochem Cycles, Marubini et al 2001 Marine Ecol Prog Ser.

There was an explosion of research in 2005 because the US funding agencies NSF and NOAA won approval from Congress (Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act) to increase funding into this important issue because it was threatening commercial aquaculture operations on the west coast. No big conspiracy, just clearly considered decisions by a lot of very conservative policy makers and scientists.[/quote]

The article goes on to debunk every point in the Specator propaganda piece and then some.

WHAT a relief! Then, we can certainly look forward to NOT HEARING ANY FURTHER about how global warming is going to destroy the reefs and end the world as we know it THIS time. We have finally put the final nail in that coffin and no one will bring up the Great Barrier Reef again JUST LIKE those Himalayan glaciers, right? and the ice on the North Pole.

So in your view, the oceans are now “acidic?” Is that what you are saying?

Why bring Cargill into this? It is a large company that serves its investors and obviously very well. What exactly is the climate change “business” doing? What is it achieving despite $1.5 trillion? Has it reduced CO2 emissions? Has it reduced “global warming?” Has it stopped the reefs from dying? Apparently not so IF it were a business, it should be allowed to go bankrupt but apparently its “investors” are shaking down the government and lots of other institutions to keep it afloat. I would say the irony is that climate change alarmism industry and Detroit have an awful lot in common: They are both producing things that no one wants at inflated costs but turning to others to prop them up because they are too important to be allowed to fail, right?

I believe you. You clearly agonize over a great many things. What’s the PH balance of your pants after the latest wetting?

Yes, rules on hyphenation do go “in and out of fashion.” Why it reminds me of the theories that are peddled with regard to global warming (SORRY!!! CLIMATE CHANGE!!!) but at least we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that URGENT ACTION is still required. WHAT a relief.

So … um, your point is, eventually humanity will have trashed literally everything, and we’ll no longer have to worry about anything except scratching a bestial living from the lifeless earth?

'kay. Logical, I suppose. Not my idea of the best possible outcome, but logical to certain sorts of mind.

I’m saying it doesn’t matter in the slightest what pH the oceans are. The reef is dead. If the deniers are saying it isn’t climate change wot dunnit, then the onus is on them to come up with (1) a plausible alternative hypothesis and (2) an experimental design to test that. Saying “that’s not supposed to happen!” doesn’t alter the fact that it did.

Come on fred. I know you know this. You’re just being contrary in a final desperate attempt to fend off cognitive dissonance.

I’ve no idea. Who cares? I don’t know where you get that ‘$1.5T’ from (some right-wing blog, I assume), but governments have always chucked money down their favourite black holes and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t see that it matters whether it goes into the pockets of bankers, oil executives, anti-communist insurgents, public-sector penpushers, or climate scientists. Around and around that money goes, making sure everyone gets the bills paid.

Anyway, there’s no such thing a “climate change business”. There are a whole load of companies making sophisticated technology to replace the laughably outdated and inefficient garbage that you seem to think is awesome. They’re making a lot of sales and a lot of profits. They’re not in the business of “climate change mitigation” because that quite obviously doesn’t delivery profits. There is no output. However, there are lots of products which coincidentally will reduce pollution, including CO2 pollution.

I guess you still subscribe to the Nixonian philosophy that because pollution correlates with economic growth, pollution causes growth. :idunno: