On 12/29/2011 9:31 AM, John VanSickle wrote:
> On 12/28/2011 6:18 AM, Warp wrote:
>> Why does it feel like the near future is going to suck hard? Let's see:
>>
>> - The climate is going so bad that in 50 to 100 years we will most
>> probably
>> be totally screwed, if not even sooner. And humanity is doing little
>> to help
>> this, even though it's a very well known problem.
>
> I see no *conclusive* evidence that the world's climate will behave any
> differently in the next fifty years than it has in the previous fifty.
> The doom-and-gloom predictors have oscillated between "global warming"
> and "impending ice age" at least three times in the past century alone.
>
Wrong.. In actual point of fact, for the most part the scientific 
community has said "warming" all along. The media, and some TV movie 
people, where the ones that introduced the absurd claims about 
"impending ice age", probably confusing it with the, at the time, still 
semi-worrisome idea of nuclear winter. For the most part, only the 
fringe, and some TV movie makers, have been running "doom and gloom" 
either. What has been said is:

1. Weather will get more complex, and probably more radical.
2. Ice caps will melt.
3. We *might*, maybe, see a slowing, or reversal of ocean flow paths, 
which *could* cause a temporary mini-ice age, in areas effected, as 
warmer water failed to travel north, and keep the ice melted.

In the third case, its possible, but if we get things bad enough, it 
won't last long, and everyone else is going to get the rest of the hell 
from the resulting weather. Its also not going to happen if there isn't 
enough cold there to freeze anything. Temps in most of the world have 
risen less than a degree. In some northern climates, its risen 5 
degrees, enough to raise the ground temp *over* the melting point. 
Globally, its its rising, but not "yet" as high as some have warned, but 
its not slowing either.

 From the other side we have:

1. Denial of whole communities disappearing due to permafrost melting 
(and the land being nothing but permafrost with some dust over it).
2. Editing of documents to remove data, charts, and mentions of rising 
tide levels in areas that where predicted to be effected.
3. Just general denial.
4. A lot of misinformation. The biggest one is that they ignore 200+ 
years of data, multiple sources of data collected from sources that can 
trace trends back thousands of years, and most of what has happened in 
the last 50 too, to harp on a small window of a few years, when, due to 
other factors, there was a "temporary" decline in temperatures, in order 
to claim that nothing at all has changed over time, its just another 
"fluctuation".

Pretty much everyone that isn't paid by an energy company, or working 
for some place like Kato, which is funded by the Koch brothers, and 
other people with an incentive for it to not be true, thinks it *is* 
conclusive. Which makes.. Nearly all of the climate scientists who are 
not paid to not see anything, cranks, or not actually climate experts 
(i.e., not climate scientists at all).

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