People complain of torrential rain and flooding in India but they have been happening for so long that they invented the word "monsoon" to describe it.
Just because you don't recognize that something is happening doesn't mean that it's not happening. Saying "Torrential rains and flooding is nothing new..." misses the point that global warming doesn't create completely new weather that is easy to recognize, it just changes the intensity or frequency of existing storms.
It would be nice if storms or droughts or floods or fires or famines were labeled "Caused by global warming," so that people like you could recognize them, but they're not, it doesn't work that way.
EDIT: Maxx says:
"We've actually had very good weather conditions over the last several decades compared to some of the horrific weather conditions of previous times"
Tell that to the people affected by Hurricane Katrina or Sandy. Personally I've had to evacuate my house twice in the last 10 years.
No new deserts have formed and this would be correct. However, desertification of some areas is happening now.
No islands have sunk below the sea, as of yet. Sea levels are rising as the oceans warm due to the expansion of the water as it warms. You do understand expansion and contraction with changing temperatures, do you not? Water behaves the same way. Sea levels are also rising due to land based glacial melt.
Fifty million climate refugees may be debatable. Assuredly, this will happen.
Agriculture is booming? Russia's 2010 drought caused the wheat crop failures that lead to the Arab uprising that overthrew the Libyan and Egyptian governments. Extended droughts in Africa has lead to the starvation of 1,000s in Africa. The drought of 2011 in the U.S. lead to reduced crop production in the U.S. - Where do you get your information from? Oh, I see. The psuedo-science master, Anthony Watts. You are aware that he is a TV weather forecaster, are you not? Can you think of a single scientific, peer reviewed study that Anthony has made? All Anthony does is search the world for any spuedo-science he can find to post on his blog. I doubt that he even has a strong consensus among TV weathermen. Although he and Joe Bastardi seem to be pretty tight, Joe lacks any scientific support for much of what he predicts as well. Joe need more time pumping the books instead of the iron.
Malaria and diseases are not spreading? I do not even know what you are trying to say with this.
Animals are not going extinct? - http://news.discovery.com/animals/big-qu...
Who told you that all of this would happen within 30 years? Most of what you talk about was shown to be a probability by the year 2100. Observations being made today indicate that much of this will happen by 2050. I think it will be even sooner than this. I do not base this on the science. I base this on the fact that there are still too many with power that will block any efforts to change the status quo. I also see people, such as self, not educating themselves in the sciences and relying on information that suits their way of thinking and this has the potential of keeping the anti-science politicians blocking anything that would alter the status. "Drill, baby, drill!" will most likely remain the rallying call for years to come.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from but it’s not accurate.
“no new deserts have formed”
Technically that’s correct as there are no new deserts, or certainly none that I’m aware of. But it says nothing of the existing deserts and the fact that they’re expanding. In China alone more than a million farmers have been forced from their land as it’s now turned to desert.
Some people claim that the deserts are greening. As is so often the case with the skeptics this is only part of the story. Whilst some parts of some deserts are greening this is far outweighed by overall losses caused by desertification.
“no Islands have sunk beneath the sea”
This is also probably correct, I’m not aware of any land-mass that has been completely lost to the sea. Once again this is a deceptive statement as it ignores islands that are now partially submerged such as Bhola, or where the water supplies have been salinated by encroaching sea-water such as is found in the Maldives, or where land mass has considerably shrunk such as Tuvalu or where populations are being evacuated such as Kiribati. Technically the islands haven’t sunk beneath the sea, but the encroaching sea has rendered them uninhabitable.
“no fifty million climate refugees”
That’s true. The original claim comes from a UNEP publication in 2005 that predicted 50 million climate refugees by 2010. Yet when you look at the data it’s not climate refugees at all, it’s the number of people who will be affected by climate change – two very different things. Quite why anyone made this claim is a mystery and I don’t think they could get away with claiming it was a typo.
“agriculture is booming”
Again this is only part of the story. In moderate climate zones agriculture is doing well, many farmers have changed what they grow to reflect the warmer conditions and there’s a lot more oils, grains, pulses, nuts, seeds etc than there use to be. In Tropical and arid climate zones agriculture has been hammered, yields are down by 5% to 25%, in sub-Saharan Africa there used to be a 1 in 10 crop failure rate, now it’s 1 in 3.
Global yields are roughly what they used to be but the failures are hitting areas that already struggled to produce enough food. Even in the developed world we’re having to import more and more food and are now buying tracts of land in Africa on which to grow our own food (this is not just down to population growth, the same applies to countries with steady or declining populations).
“malaria and diseases are not spreading”
I’m not sure who told you that but they most definitely are spreading. At least 30 different diseases are known to have spread due to global warming. Malaria is one of them but of greatest concern is dengue as there’s no known vaccination or cure.
Better protection and awareness of some diseases is helping to reduce casualty numbers but many diseases are now found in areas that were hitherto unaffected including chagas disease, onchocerciasis, dracunculiasis, lymphatic filariasis, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, leptospirosis, strongyloidiasis, cholera, trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, neurocysticercosis, trichuriasis, pneumonic plague, hantavirus, viral encephalitis and malaria. An good book on the subject is Introducing Medical Anthropology by Dr Merrill Singer and Dr Hans Baer.
“animals are not going extinct”
It’s always difficult to know if animals are going extinct, not least because we don’t know how many species exist in the first place, and also because many of the same species are catalogued several times over; therefore something could go extinct and go un-noticed or another species may become extinct and be counted as several separate extinctions. There are always going to be extinctions and separating the background level from any specific cause is nigh on impossible. So how many species has global warming killed off? Probably a few but it could be none or it could be several dozen.
The fact that you haven't done your research does not mean climate change is not having an impact.
Go have a look at the thousands of papers published by biologists each year examining species under threat particularly amphibians, birds, and coral. Go have a look at the UN reports, or those of the WWF.
I'm afraid you are simply wrong.
actually, the melting arctic is changing the politics and economy of the region. China and Russia will be key players in moving cargo across what used to be fairly steady ice.
I would not be so sure about intensifying storms and record weather. Changing the energy balance does have implications. Simple statistics also show that changing a mean average does change the tail ends of distribution curves. Yes strorms have always happened, but not in increasing frequency
And these changes are only with about 1C change. Now imaging double the effects.
Serious people like military concerned about global and regional conflicts as well as civil engineers designing storm sewers and dikes are taking it seriously.
Quote by emeritus professor Daniel Botkin: "The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe."
Quote by Sir John Houghton, pompous lead editor of first three IPCC reports: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”
So we take a 0.7 degree C increase in temperature from 1650 until 1990 (according to the IPCC's 1990 report.) and turn it into a catastrophe. It works among the uninformed, as you can see, we even have some on this site.
The fuss is about getting into our pockets.
We've actually had very good weather conditions over the last several decades compared to some of the horrific weather conditions of previous times. Of course we have not been able to enjoy this long period of wonderful weather and good growing conditions because the greedy man-kind hating Warmist have been continuously screeching in our ears that we were all about to die due to their invented problem.
-----------------------
In short - alarmingly reduced soil fertility and significantly more freaky weather conditions, droughts and flooding - but since the latter is all statistics, you cannot say with perfect certainty that it's down to global warming / climate change. It's not about the 2 degrees or more that the global average temperature may rise. It's about our climate being thrown out of kilter.
--
Climate change has to be seen in the context of top soil erosion and alarming loss of soil fertility, and the disturbance of nature's most important functions, which are: 1) balancing out the daily solar irradiation peak, and 2) retaining water and nutrients in the system. These two functions are linked, as nature uses the hydrology cycle to dissipate and smooth out the solar energy input mainly by evaporation and condensation of water, the substance with the highest specific heat capacity on the planet (slightly beaten only by lithium at 181 degrees C!). This cooling effect during the day is most noticeable in or near marshland, swamps or (intact) forests. Nature also keeps nutrients on site, mostly bound in biomass (humus, vegetation, bacteria, plankton and animals) and optimizes the nutrient cycle by minimizing waste. (Loss of species diversity is a symptom often associated with the degradation of these vital functions, as diverse natural communities often perform best at fulfilling these functions.)
--
Now, humans have degraded these systems and opened the hydrology and nutrient cycles, generating lots of waste, accelerating by factors of 10s to 100s the leaching of nutrients into the oceans. For the time being, we are able to maintain agricultural productivity by using high amounts of fossil fuels, not least for producing nitrogen fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen by way of the hugely energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process. And while fossil fuel isn't exactly running out, we had (or are very close to) the production maximum or "peak oil" (temporarily shrouded by the current hydraulic fracturing or fracking hype). Obtaining and burning fossil fuels has many negative effects on the landscape and human health, a major one being water pollution, but I'm going off on a tangent.
We also encapsulate biomass with high levels of "toxins" in it (sludge/bio-solids) and withhold it from the natural cycles. Nature has sophisticated ways of dealing with most of these "toxins", including sequestering heavy metals.
And by the way, this completely harmless yet all hyped-up CO2 has a minor role in climate change, which, as explained, happens mostly locally due to destructively opening up the hydrology and nutrient cycles. Due to the colossal infatuation with this "see oh too" stuff, a vast majority of effort has been concentrated on dealing with curbing emission of it, and given rise to a highly profitable economic bubble called carbon trading.
--
So in summary, it's not a scare, it's a very real and increasing threat, it's just that our perspective, and thence our remedial efforts, have become almost completely side-tracked.
Have you seen the documentary CRUDE the incredible journey of oil, ABC
Think of those old cars getting stuck in the mud before roads .
The fuss is they are trying to blame hurricanes and tornado's on global warming .
The problem is there was tornado's , droughts , floods ,etc before the cult of global warming .
They are pretending none of those things happened before the year 2000 .
Here we are thirty years on, and not much has changed, no new deserts have formed, no Islands have sunk beneath the sea, no fifty million climate refugees, agriculture is booming, malaria and diseases are not spreading, animals are not going extinct, Whats the fuss?
Its just that so many people who should have really looked into this global worming , and not just fall for the biggest scam in the history of man kind ,It was a hokiest and no more .
No islands have sunk YET but it may happen by 2100. Agriculture is booming in some places and being devastated by torrential rains and flooding in others, You tend to make blanket statements which are only partially true. If you are at all interested in climate refugees, check out the following links
http://www.refugeesinternational.org/pol...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment...
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/...
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/18/185068648/...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2...
http://www.trust.org/item/20130802101500...
Due to deforestation, more plants and animals go extinct every year. Many we have yet to discover Try doing some real web searching before you make more blanket statements While you are at it maybe one of your ilk could find some real published climate science published by a real climatologist to support your lame refusal to accept AGW
We should be grateful that the polar bears are not yet extinct, or that the Venetian gondoliers have not yet relocated to New York. Just because some bad things haven't happened yet, doesn't mean they won't happen.
