Climate change: a catastrophe in slow motion

[watsup]

“The word catastrophe usually brings to mind phenomena like tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, or asteroid impacts—disasters that are over in an instant and have immediately evident dire consequences. The changes in Earth’s climate wrought by industrial carbon dioxide emissions do not at first glance seem to fit this mold since they take a century or more for their consequences to fully manifest. However, viewed from the perspective of geological time, human- induced climate change, known more familiarly as “global warming,” is a catastrophe equal to nearly any other in our planet’s history. Seen by a geologist a million years from now, the era of global warming will probably not seem as consequential as the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. It will, however, appear in the geological record as an event comparable to such major events as the onset or termination of an ice age or the transition to the hot, relatively ice- free climates that prevailed seventy million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It will be all the more cataclysmic for having taken place in the span of one or a few centuries, rather than millennia or millions of years.
Humans have become a major geological force with the power to commit future millennia to practically irreversible changes in global conditions.
What makes global warming unique in the four billion year history of the planet is that the causative agents—humans—are sentient. We can foresee the consequences of our actions, albeit imperfectly, and we have the power, if not necessarily the will, to change our behavior so as to effectuate a different future. The conjuncture of foresight and unprecedented willful power over the global future thrusts the matter onto the stage where notions of responsibility, culpability, and ethics come into play. “

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/myownPapers-d/Pierrehumbert06-LawReviewCatastrophe.pdf

The author has been Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago since 1989,
having earlier served on the faculties of MIT and Princeton, and has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. He was a lead author of chapter 7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (cited in note 4) and a co-author of the National Research Council study on abrupt climate change.

 

[watsup]

“Human-induced emissions of several gases other than carbon dioxide also contribute to global warming, but in the long run, carbon dioxide is by far the biggest player and the most embedded in economic activity.

Despite its low concentration, carbon dioxide plays a key role in determining the Earth’s climate because this gas greatly retards the efficiency with which the planet loses energy to space by infrared (heat) radiation. The major constituents of the atmosphere are essentially transparent to infrared radiation. Carbon dioxide warms the Earth in the same way a sleeping bag or down comforter warms a person—by reducing the rate of heat loss. For the Earth, this additional blanketing allows the planet to maintain a higher temperature than would otherwise be possible, given the rate of solar energy input from the Sun.
Water vapor is the other major player in the Earth’s energy budget, but its concentration in the atmosphere is buffered on a time scale of weeks by the huge oceanic reservoir of water, which can rapidly evaporate into the atmosphere and equally rapidly rain out. Water vapor thus adjusts in response to other changes in climate (principally temperature); rather than being a prime mover, it is a feedback amplifying other causes of climate change, including carbon dioxide increase. This is why water vapor, though an important greenhouse gas, is not regulated under the Kyoto Protocol3 or under proposed California state-level climate control regulations.
Carbon dioxide, in contrast, has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere and very weak natural sources; therefore, changes in the rate at which carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere have great leverage over the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content. Carbon dioxide is implicated in virtually all of the great climate shifts in Earth’s history, including the coming and going of the Ice Ages; the eons of warm ice-free states that the dinosaurs lived in some seventy million years ago; the collapse of the Earth into a globally frozen state in the Neoproterozoic era some six hundred million years ago; and the maintenance of conditions favorable to life on the very young Earth, when the Sun was much fainter than it is today.“

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/myownPapers-d/Pierrehumbert06-LawReviewCatastrophe.pdf

 

[watsup]

And I note that the climate deniers very carefully avoid replying to a thread that lists actual climate change facts as noted by an actual scientist who has done research in the area, as this one does.

 

[Mircea]

The author has been Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago since 1989, having earlier served on the faculties of MIT and Princeton, and has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. He was a lead author of chapter 7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (cited in note 4) and a co-author of the National Research Council study on abrupt climate change.

Climate change is all about wealth redistribution from the Western World to the Other World. It's never been about "saving Planet Earth." It's always been about taking money from Western Europe, Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan and giving it to South America, Africa and Asia (but not Eastern Europe) as some kind of differently twisted reparations.

https://www.nzz.ch/klimapolitik_vert..._neu-1.8373227

From the link above, this is the question posed by the interviewer:

De facto ist das eine Enteignung der Länder mit den Bodenschätzen. Das führt zu einer ganz anderen Entwicklung als der, die bisher mit Entwicklungspolitik angestossen wurde.

And this is Erdenhofer's response:

Zunächst mal haben wir Industrieländer die Atmosphäre der Weltgemeinschaft quasi enteignet. Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um. Dass die Besitzer von Kohle und Öl davon nicht begeistert sind, liegt auf der Hand. Man muss sich von der Illusion freimachen, dass internationale Klimapolitik Umweltpolitik ist. Das hat mit Umweltpolitik, mit Problemen wie Waldsterben oder Ozonloch, fast nichts mehr zu tun.

The statement we want to focus on is this:

Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um.

And this is what he said in English literally -- a word-for-word translation:

But one must clearly say: We redistribute through the Climate Policy in fact the World Wealth around.

The best English translation is:

But one must clearly say:

We redistribute World Wealth through Climate Policy.

Once again, for those who want to do their own fact-checking (and I encourage everyone to do so):

Aber = But (a conjunction)

man = one (in the sense of a person not the number "one" which is ein, eine or einen as declension requires to be in agreement with the noun)

muss = must (a helping verb)

klar = clear/clearly (an adverb) as in "Alles klar, Herr Kommisar?" (you know, from the song by Falco from the album "After the Fire")

sagen: say (a verb)

Wir = we (a pronoun)

verteilen = redistribute (a verb and note that teilen is distribute)

durch = through (a preposition)

die Klimapolitik = the Climate Policy (a noun and Germans capitalize nouns and pronouns)

de facto = in fact (an adverbial prepositional phrase)

das Weltvermögen = the World Wealth (a noun)

um = around (a preposition like in the phrase "um die Ecke" which means around the corner as if you were asking a German for directions)

The IPCC's mission is to "study" climate change due to man-made CO2 and to the exclusion of all other causes.

That's as absurd as a cancer research institute examining smoking as the sole cause of all cancers to the exclusion of all other possible causes.

 

[watsup]

Climate change is all about wealth redistribution from the Western World to the Other World. It's never been about "saving Planet Earth." It's always been about taking money from Western Europe, Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan and giving it to South America, Africa and Asia (but not Eastern Europe) as some kind of differently twisted reparations.

https://www.nzz.ch/klimapolitik_vert..._neu-1.8373227

From the link above, this is the question posed by the interviewer:

De facto ist das eine Enteignung der Länder mit den Bodenschätzen. Das führt zu einer ganz anderen Entwicklung als der, die bisher mit Entwicklungspolitik angestossen wurde.

And this is Erdenhofer's response:

Zunächst mal haben wir Industrieländer die Atmosphäre der Weltgemeinschaft quasi enteignet. Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um. Dass die Besitzer von Kohle und Öl davon nicht begeistert sind, liegt auf der Hand. Man muss sich von der Illusion freimachen, dass internationale Klimapolitik Umweltpolitik ist. Das hat mit Umweltpolitik, mit Problemen wie Waldsterben oder Ozonloch, fast nichts mehr zu tun.

The statement we want to focus on is this:

Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um.

And this is what he said in English literally -- a word-for-word translation:

But one must clearly say: We redistribute through the Climate Policy in fact the World Wealth around.

The best English translation is:

But one must clearly say:

We redistribute World Wealth through Climate Policy.

Once again, for those who want to do their own fact-checking (and I encourage everyone to do so):

Aber = But (a conjunction)

man = one (in the sense of a person not the number "one" which is ein, eine or einen as declension requires to be in agreement with the noun)

muss = must (a helping verb)

klar = clear/clearly (an adverb) as in "Alles klar, Herr Kommisar?" (you know, from the song by Falco from the album "After the Fire")

sagen: say (a verb)

Wir = we (a pronoun)

verteilen = redistribute (a verb and note that teilen is distribute)

durch = through (a preposition)

die Klimapolitik = the Climate Policy (a noun and Germans capitalize nouns and pronouns)

de facto = in fact (an adverbial prepositional phrase)

das Weltvermögen = the World Wealth (a noun)

um = around (a preposition like in the phrase "um die Ecke" which means around the corner as if you were asking a German for directions)

The IPCC's mission is to "study" climate change due to man-made CO2 and to the exclusion of all other causes.

That's as absurd as a cancer research institute examining smoking as the sole cause of all cancers to the exclusion of all other possible causes.

Where do you get this "to the exclusion of all other causes bit"? Nothing could be further from the truth.