[ExI] Forbes posting

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> On 05/12/2012 22:45, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > Global warming due to anthropogenic increase in CO2 is real, but what 
> > does that ***really*** mean?  The issue has been thoroughly 
> > politicized. Climate models have long been crap, and I think, still 
> > are.  The left says "We're doomed!  We're doomed!" and the right says 
> > "What problem?, fill 'er with high test."
> 
> Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The 
> local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of:
[...]

Me, after being scared like hell initially, came to some peace with GW 
after few years, and for about a decade I watch debates and antidebates 
with interest and sometimes with a grin. I hope to gather some more info, 
if not about GW then maybe at least about human behaviour. The dispute 
itself seems to be very emotional and from what I have seen, people tend 
to throw a lot of more or less related things into it, and making them 
emotional again, and not reaching any kind of consensus. The whole show is 
half educating and half pitiful.

First of all, it is obvious that climate is changing. It can be easily 
concluded by reading a bit about history. For one example, in January 1658 
Baltic Sea froze between Danish islands, making it possible to march 
entire Swedish army, complete with cavalry and cannons, and attack Danes 
there. I don't recall hearing about such things nowadays (even if we agree 
there's no point to match Swedish and Danish armies against each other, 
such huge piece of ice would beg for a marathon or other races). One can 
read a lot more here (includes few words about villages destroyed by 
advancing glaciers some 300 years ago - soo, they built a village where 
there was no glacier and some time after that glacier took over it):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age

Ok, so it is changing. Now, in what direction. A long term tendency seems 
to be warming indeed, with smaller ups and downs. However, what they 
easily forget to tell in tv is that GW started about 20000 years ago - 
yes, twenty thousand. About that date the maximum extent of ice took 
place, during last glacial period. Notice the word "last".

Ok, so it is warming. I can see from various sources, that maximum 
increase in sea levels (about 100+ meters) is already done, and I guess 
the whole W thing slows down actually. I can also see that we are going 
through periods of cool and hot for some 800000 years (eight hundred 
thousand). Now, I come to a problem. "We" don't come through this all. 
There wasn't "we" until about 170000 years ago. So who the hell was 
running car and petroleum industry million years ago?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation

Because, you see, this GW has been caused by industry. By humans. Cool. 
Any archeological findings to support this hypothesis? Never heard of 
them.

So, I must have obvious gaps in education because I was told in school 
that industrial age started about 250 years ago. Being such undereducated 
person, I have obvious problem with accepting theory about humans being 
main factor driving GW. Assuming that GW is this thing started twenty 
thousand years ago and not some fashionable change of climate that started 
about 1815 A.D. (a bit too fast for me to ascribe it to nascent industry).

So this is a thing about climate change from my POV. The one hypothesis 
about making all the fuss is that marketing drives us more than we'd like 
to acknowledge - we all need to buy more green, because this is good, 
everybody knows it is good and besides, it helps wave of new products out 
of the drawer. Another is, that humans en masse don't like idea of being 
helpless - and if indeed we have nothing to say about GW, we are not going 
to say so publicly, instead going from dispute to dispute and pulling 
hairs from one's head, why oh why politicians/industrialists don't do 
something, if only they did they would have stopped GW but they don't do, 
oh my.

To this, we can throw many other problems. A problem with overgrown 
population. A problem with running out of water (salted water doesn't 
count and water is needed a lot, not only for drinks and whisky on the 
rocks but for industrial production as well). And last but not least, a 
problem with energy sources.

All of those problems are only slightly related to GW, IMHO. And with or 
without GW we would have had them anyway. So perhaps they should be 
discussed without connecting to emotional GW quarrels. Which are going to 
last quite long if I am judging all of this right.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **