EXACTLY! You got it… FINALLY! Just like that! It is why I wrote it. To give you a taste of your own. I didn’t even have any so called mistake in mind. I just wanted you to see what it was like to have one make vague unsubstantiated indictments without a shred of explanation as you have done with others in this thread!
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You should read up on what those numbers actually are. Here would be a good place to start.
And even if you were right (I’m not sure you even managed to get a single thing correct in your entire post - do you ever get tired of being lied to and manipulated by the denialists?) … but even if you were - your approach still fails to even rise to the level of rationality. Because your approach is just like someone who, while they and their family is sweltering in their warm house, start obsessing about what percentage of the heat in the house is coming from outside, what percentage is coming from the kitchen, what percentage is coming from the people in the house - and upon learning that he is only contributing a small portion of all the accumulating heat in the house, he decides that he doesn’t need to do anything about it because the majority of it isn’t his fault. All of which makes zero sense.
Eventually the family may conclude it was a bad day to have all the ovens on and be doing all that baking. They may even decide to go and turn the stoves and oven off, even though those only accounted for part of all the heat that just comes and goes naturally anyway.
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For me the most obvious sign of the problem are all these algae blooms we are experiencing. This is something I was expecting and I predicted it long ago. Though at the time, I was thinking it would help. But it does not. They are toxic, harmful, and are a symptom showing us that something is wrong. They can be green, red, blue, or brown – but if they are red that should sound like a plague from the Bible.
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Warming affects the algae blooms but an increase in the availability of the critical nutrients has a stronger effect. Although warm weathers may increase the growth rate of some species, the growth depends on the availability of critical nutrients. Hot and calm weathers lift some species, like blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) to the surface and make the bloom visible from the air. When the wind starts to blow, the cyanobacteria become mixed in the water column and the bloom is less visible but the algae have not disappeared. You can predict the severity of the blooms by measuring the availability of critical nutrients in the water before the blooms.
For example here, blooms of blue-green algae have become so regular and massive that owners of summer cottages by the sea are buying large hot tubs and jacuzzis because they often cannot go to swim in the sea during the late summer due to the toxic blooms. People need to adapt to the new situation.
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It looks to me that different types of algae in different locations respond to different environmental changes. Some like warmer water and some like colder water. For some it is the increased CO2 which stimulates accelerated growth.
Warm weather can perhaps affect the growth rate of some species, especially at the edges of the range. I assume that climate change may have a stronger effect by affecting the currents, the upwelling of nutrients from deep waters, and the expansion of areas where a lack of oxygen affects the food chains.
Oceans and smaller water bodies have become patients with multiple sicknesses. Human activity is the main cause of most of these sicknesses. At least increased temperatures, nutrient levels and acidity as well as the expansion of the areas suffering from a lack of oxygen are all attributed to human activity. There are also additional problems that are not as strongly linked to algae blooms, such as the huge amounts of plastic and the robbery-like use of resources. Overfishing of large predatory fish might have an effect on plankton by affecting the abundance of the species that eat algae. I guess we can take the merit of all these changes.
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“The current world I observe is literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation, and what I will call “techno-cons.” Techno-cons are the application of scientific disinformation for opportunistic purposes.”
“Now I am not alone in observing the dangerous proliferation of pseudoscience. Recently, The Nobel Foundation has formed a new panel to address the issue called the International Panel on Information Environment. They plan to model it after the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
I think personally that they are making a big mistake in that effort because in my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation. What I’m about to recommend is in furtherance of that, of the aims of that panel.”
“I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”
(emphasis added throughout)
Dr. John F. Clauser, American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics … was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”
That’s the problem when specialists speak outside their specialty. It just another opinion, and in this case, dead wrong. Inattentive and gullible people fall for the argument from authority, argumentum ab auctoritate, just because someone is a renowned expert in his niche certainly does not qualify him as an expert in other fields of study.
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I have to mentally shut it out when I do my conservation where I bury my hands in the sand trying to get native plants growing to restore the indigenous biome – if I think about it too much the work starts to feel pointless.
Actually that can be calculated right down to the nearest joule. Thanks to satellites we know the sun’s output without the atmosphere getting in the way, and we know the cross-sectional area of the Earth and its atmosphere, so it’s a simple problem in flux.
Every now and then there’s another research paper arguing that if we weren’t warming the planet we’d be in the start of a new ice age!
One went by only about a third of the distance to the moon and it wasn’t seen until it had passed – that’s a bit scary.
Though they say it was “only” big enough to be a city-killer. I guess somehow that’s supposed to be a comfort?
There’s no profit in it.
We made a good start back in the 1970s but slacked off.
Actually it can be calculated. In my university days we ran the numbers in botany class and also in astronomy. The astronomy calculations were a bit rougher because not as much on-the-ground data was included. I don’t recall the numbers, just that we looked at the results and said, “Oh, crap”.
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I can testify that it’s real just from observations while doing my conservation work. Over the last twenty years I’ve watched predicted changes happening, most recently in the pattern of cooler, drier summers here.
Due in large part to the excessive use of chemical fertilizers.
He’s got an agenda – any university students who’s passed thermodynamics knows better than that.
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Of course not 
Global climate change makes me think about the problem of evil. At the end of the day, the system designed by God has been causing draughts, famines and mass starvation for millions of years long before the Industrial Revolution. I’m guessing La Niña has killed millions in parts of Africa. Anthropogenic climate change may very well be intensifying parts of the system God built. Just another of the countless formulations of the problem of natural evil. Thinking about it makes me shut down on climate change. I don’t know how to process it and I am often inadequately built to handle morality so far removed at such distances. It also seems like a completely lost cause. I find it takes a lot more work than it should to actually care about climate change as it is presented
Vinnie
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I tend not to care except as how it impacts me where I live and in my conservation work – thinking about even North America is too much effort.
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It would not be hard to be consumed by caring. It’s good to have a trustworthy Father upon whom we can rest our cares.
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I was going to do a long rant about apathy …
but can’t be bothered.
Strikes me that there are two polar views:
-
Scaremongering panic
-
Apathetic ignorance
And for once, very little middle ground.
Richard
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Maybe your viewpoint is a bit too pessimistic. Many do fall to one of these two extremes, believers especially to the do-not-care/not-my-business/why-care-because-God-will-come-and-pick-us-from-the-coming-environmental-hell extreme of the continuum. Yet, these are just the extremes, there are much possibilities and positions between the ends.
A single human can do very little to prevent this kind of global threats. Yet, millions are willing to do something and that has an effect. Changing public opinion and the ongoing catastrophes have changed policies towards better. Even China seems to switch towards renevable production of energy, slowly but faster than anyone expected a year ago. When CO2 emissions start to decline in China, the global emissions will also decline. That will slow down the negative trend in climate change.
The small positive signs of change gives hope. As long as there seems to be no hope, you fall to one of the ends. We are called to bring hope to people. It is primarily the hope that deals with our relationship with God and eternity. It should also include acting in this life to help other people and make this planet a bit better place to live. If we forget our hope and responsibilities, we could as well stop moving and eating because we will anyhow die one day. Whatever we do - eat, drink, sleep, work - that will not change our fate much because we die anyway.
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A Finnish professor made recently an interesting observation in China that reflects the speed of change in that country. He was flying above northern (or north-western) China, an area that is mainly mountains, deserts and wilderness. The area looked very different compared to the previous time he saw it. The mountains were covered by wind power mills. Lower hills and deserts were covered by solar power stations. The sea of panels extended beyond the horizon.
In Shanghai and Nanjing, almost half of the cars had green plates telling they were fully electric cars. Such cars are freed from taxes, which makes them cheaper than cars running with fossil fuels.
I do not know what kind of environmental impacts the huge scale of wind and solar power stations has caused but the observation tells that much is currently happening to reduce the CO2 emissions. China is one of the countries that have suffered and will suffer from climate change. That has changed the policies although coal mining is regionally and politically important source of income and jobs. When there is a need and will, much can happen in a short time.
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We are living interesting times because the recent changes in the international politics have changed the focus of the news and that appears to have changed the way how people react to the news about the climate change and the other environmental problems.
Year 2024 was the first year when the global average temperature was more than 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial temperatures (1.55 ± 0.13 °C above the 1850-1900 average).
In Finnish Lapland, the summer was the warmest during the last 2000 years, based on known temperature measurements and annual rings of trees.
Despite many record-breaking figures, there has not been much public discussion about the climate change lately. It seems that more acute problems have filled the news space and pushed the environmental crises out of the spotlights.
Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East feel threatening, especially as there is no longer trust to the former strongest ally of the camp of the western countries. Wars in the area have increased the risk of military actions elsewhere on the globe, as the international attention and much of military power has been focused on the wars in Europe and the Middle East. Countries are strengthening their military capabilities and putting a growing proportion of the GDP to weapons.
That has filled much of news space during the last months.
The dropping economic prospects due to international tax wars and growing uncertainty have increased the interest in the economy. Selfish ideas about ensuring the strength of the economy at the cost of the environmental goals are lifted up in all countries with populist movements that are sometimes labelled as right-wing parties - in practically all countries.
Here, the political party with the most ‘Christian’ identity has noted the changing political atmosphere and started to support politics that could be called anti-environmental - postpone any demands towards carbon neutrality, no more restrictions in the use of forests to ensure that the pulp mills will produce the maximum amount of income, new mines should be opened to ensure the production of critical minerals, even in environmentally vulnerable areas, etc.
I do not think that people have stopped to fear what happens in the future. My interpretation is that people cannot carry too many fears at the same time and the more acute fears have now captured the spotlights. If you fear for a war and unemployment, there is not left space for worrying about climate change. That may seem to be apathetic ignorance but I guess it is more an incapability to carry too many worries at the same time.
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