21 replies to this topic

[PersianPaladin]

I think the lyrics to this song sum the whole situation up: -




(Sorry mods if slightly off-topic)

Edited by PersianPaladin, 11 May 2010 - 02:26 .

[Thundery wintry showers]

songster, on 10 May 2010 - 10:59 , said:

Precisely. The global climate appears to have several quasi-stable states. Off the top of my head, I can list at least four: snowball Earth, Ice Age, temperate interglacial and hothouse. These respectively have: total ice cover, large ice caps, small ice caps, no ice caps. Currently we are in the temperate interglacial state. Any or all of the above climates (except maybe snowball Earth) are likely to be compatible with human life and advanced civilisation. The process of changing from one state to another is very likely to disrupt human civilisation and may even cause a complete breakdown back to hunter-gatherer levels.


As such, we really should do all we can to avoid pushing ourselves towards the tipping points that cause climate transitions. Since the details of these are unknown, extreme caution in adding or removing any particular forcing (e.g. GHGs, deforestation) is advisable.

A very good post IMHO. I think we may well be at risk of "hastening our own demise" if we aren't careful, pushing the climate towards a kind of change that might happene anyway without human intervention- but tens/hundreds of thousands of years down the line. Or even generating a change of different sign (moving us into an additional warm phase instead of a straight descent into the next ice age).