I remember my young son coming to me and asking if the world was going to end because of YK2. Expect you've forgotten that scare. He also didn't want to die young.
All this worry over a non-existent problem, much like Global Warming.
0.8 degrees in 150 years?
Big deal.
(not that anyone ever measured it in the first place)
"He said this is why there are all these Mars missions happening"
Your friend is a kook. No one is going to live on mars in the next twenty to thirty years. It will probably take that long just to get the money to send two or three guys there for a mission. And it's going to cost big time just for that.
Lots of things COULD wipe out humanity. At the top of that list is our own stupidity.
Your friend has been watching to many sci-fi movies, nobody is escaping to Mars, we are still decades from even being able to send a few astronauts there for a brief visit, a self sustain colony is well beyond our current technology.
The facts, unlike the string of BS some of our denier friends have posted.
i.e. kano - "but Antarctica ice is growing"
This is simply not true, denier like to yell this from the tree tops but always fail to mention this relates to Antarctic sea ice, which does not have any great effect on sea level, what does is the glacial ice and for the Antarctic the data on that is clear.
http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators#l...
Then we have cyclops - "Nothing they forecast has come true."
A popular rant with deniers ask them to back it up and you get either silence or a string of BS from blogs, i.e. they have nothing to back this claim.
By forecasts he means the models and sadly for deniers most of the mid level models are on or below what is happening, temperature is in with the A2 model, which is one of the higher models
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data...
and the sea ice mentioned by kano, well the Arctic is melting faster than was first estimated, so technically scientists did get that wrong, but not in a way that really helps the denier case.
Denier also try and claim that the current sea level rise is nothing at 3.16mm per year, they lurch from claiming it a continuation of the end of the last ice age to saying it will take 100's of years to cause a problem.
This ranting has two major flaws
A) there is a record of the last ice sea level rates it shows a rapid (over several thousand years) rise and then a slow drop in the rate of rise from 8000 years ago to 4000 years ago to around 2000 years ago when the rise pretty much stopped, the current rate is a return to rise rates not seen in close to 7000 years.
Sea level rise over the last 24,000 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-G...
With a closer view of the last 8000
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H...
B) The rate is not going to stay at 3.16mm it has in fact already pretty much doubled over the rate of 1.7mm that the tide gauge record shows going back about 150 years. the (as denier call it) "tiny" rise of 0.8c in temperature has caused what we have seen so far, if temps rise by 2 or 3c by the end of the century there will be a corresponding rise in sea level due to thermal expansion and further and accelerating melting of glacial ice, that is basic physics.
Deniers won't or can't address either of these points as they have no real answers except rant about Al Gore or inventing new global conspiracy theories.
P.S. has your friend actually thought through his theory
"He said that it would take trillions of dollars for the world to try to prevent this from happening"
As trillions is the figure usually used to describe how much it would cost to send just a small short term trip to Mars, plus these so called rich are rich because of 'things' they have on Earth, they would have to leave all of them behind, to travel to a planet that can't support human life, a planet with no practical magnetic field and an atmosphere that is virtually a vacuum.
The sea level air pressure on Earth is 14.69 psi we can live in a range well below this as some do in the Himalayas but at the extreme, the top of Everest the pressure is 4.89 psi ~30%, here we can survive for perhaps 30min but you are literally dying when you are here, on Mars the pressure is 0.087 psi, unprotected on the surface you die immediately. The surface of Mars is in fact 1/10th of the Armstrong limit which is the point where the water in the human body boils.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_l...
AGW is not the end of the world by any means, that is a fantasy (one stirred by deniers as far as I can see) the science is that AGW will cause sea level to rise a few meters in the short term ~100 years, in the long term 10's of meters but that would take 100's of years at least but it is an inevitable outcome of a warmer planet, it's happened before naturally, this time we are causing it.
Even if we were destroying the planet it would still be a better place to live than Mars. Imagine what kind of place you could create here for what it would cost to get someone to Mars.
Relax the Arctic might have melted a bit, but Antarctica ice is growing, the methane in the permafrost myth is exaggerated, it is in low concentration and down through hundreds of meters of ground, and will take hundreds of years to be released at predicted warming rates, plus we have had no warming for 16yrs now, and the last ten years have had slight cooling.
The sea levels are rising, over the last century they have risen 6.7 inches according to the grace satellite program. if you stood at the high water mark, it might take fifty years for your feet to get wet.
We can avoid global warming if we can control the population and bring it below seven billion instead of it increasing. We also need to plant more trees as people instead of letting companies cut down trees like they are doing for wood. They should recycle wood instead of cutting down trees and if they cut down trees they should plant as many as they cut. Also cars need to be reduced and fossil fuels need to be limited in favour of renewable energy.
Contrary to denialist claims, sea level rise is a serious threat. I find it funny that people who point out that Earth's climate is too complex to model with computers claim that sea level rise will continue at a linear rate.
But glacier water tends to be quite clean. It does not contain large amounts of harmful bacteria and viruses. And even if Earth's atmosphere could reach the same composition and pressure as that of Venus, Earth's temperature would not be more than 60-80 degrees C. And under that much pressure, water would boil at 307 degrees C.
http://www.steamtablesonline.com/steam97...
the answers have been known for a long time enough time for those who caused it to become wealthy and enjoy it at our expense they can enjoy their gains before the end of life as we know it ...martin
The Arctic is global warming's canary in the coal mine. It's a highly sensitive region, and it's being profoundly affected by the changing climate. Most scientists view what's happening now in the Arctic as a harbinger of things to come.
Nope, it's just plain and simple bullshite spouted by liars with a political agenda, and useful idiots.
Mostly you hear about global warming melting the ice caps and how it could potentially flood major costal cities and that seems to be everyone's concern. A friend brought something up today though.. he said that the ice caps contain a lot of frozen bacteria and viruses that will thaw, get into fish, and spread to humans and potentially kill us all. Then, if that doesn't get us, all the methane and CO2 in the ice caps will be too much for us. He said this is why there are all these Mars missions happening, so the rich can get out. He said this could wipe out humanity and will happen within the next 20 to 30 years. He said that it would take trillions of dollars for the world to try to prevent this from happening so they're basically just not going to do anything and let the rich go to Mars and attempt to keep on going. It was a brief conversation about this though and that's basically all that was said. Is this true? I mean is ALL of this true? Is this going to happen and nobody is going to try to stop it? I don't want to only live until I'm 40 or 50! I want a long life!
Nothing they forecast has come true. All they have left are busted theories, tampered NOAA and GISS data, and fraudulent John Cook surveys.
It is pathetic. And Obama’s teleprompter can’t stop talking about it.
