global warming is not human caused paper

[rc white]

Money as such is not the cause of any of our woes it is the definition of money.
An original definition was that money is, "a token for goods and services".
What sustainability means is the recognition that at any particular time the amount of goods and services that the planet can provide per unit of time is finite, therefore giving no inflation the amount of money that can be used per unit of time is also finite.
From this then the money system we presently have becomes the arbitrary creation of tokens for goods and services mainly to benefit hoarders of these tokens. The result of which is that they have a store of tokens for goods and services vastly greater than they can ever use and if they decided to cash in and demand goods and services for their hoard there would be non for any body else on an availability per unit time basis. The answer to this then in our present economic system is to create more money, the money that already exists being then known as "capital".
In a truly sustainable system it is not possible for money to be anything other than an abstract token that has a time dimension. Since only a finite amount of goods and services are available per unit of time it is only possible for any economy to exchange a finite amount of money per unit of time, and any excess money canceled to re normalize the books for the next time period, this of course means a drastic re think of what exactly we mean by capital.
rcw

[BoredWombat]

Originally Posted by isenhand

Here’s an interesting paper that argues that global warming is not human caused.

Figure 1 doesn't look right.

Perhaps the Sargasso Sea isn't representative of global climate, but temperature reconstructions don't tend to show the medieval climatic optimum or any previous time since the last ice age as warmer than today.

Here are some reconstructions used by the IPCC



I suspect that the difference might be, as MikeTV pointed out, this is not the output from a scientific group but a political pressure group. They appear to be adjusting the facts a bit to suit the argument.

[BoredWombat]

Originally Posted by MartinSykes

Climate change isn't 'human caused'. It's *probably* 'human exacerbated'.

The climate change we're seeing now is human caused in the sense that we would not be seeing a warming at all were it not for anthropogenic forcing:

Originally Posted by MartinSykes

With no human input there have been ice ages in the past and there will be again. It's almost a moot point whether change is caused by us or something else - it's something the human race will have to deal with either way.

It is mootish.

However a natural change (outside natural extraterrestrial impacts and natural super volcanic eruptions) would be able to be better handled by the biosphere.

The current change is very rapid. The 0.2°C per decade that we are seeing is about 20 times faster than the very rapid warming that naturally at the end of an ice age.

The current change is warming from close to the warmest part of an interglacial. The resultant climate is one warmer than any of the flora or fauna alive today has had to contend with during its evolution. A few living fossils excepted.

Originally Posted by MartinSykes

Sustainability isn't about finding a balance to avoid change - it's about maintaining a balance despite change. We need to sort out our energy use, transport and agriculture because we can't carry on as we are regardless of the climate. If the climate is stable for the rest of eternity we will still run out of oil and tens of millions of people will continue to die every year from starvation and thirst.

I agree with this.

Originally Posted by MartinSykes

I'm just worried that if we focus too much on CO2 emissions and climate change we are taking our eye off the bigger picture. Reducing consumption isn't just about reducing climate emissions - it's also about weaning ourselves off increasingly scarce natural resources.

This is also true, but I think that runaway global warming will be much more significant than any of the other problems that we currently have.

There's some rather nasty tipping points within a few degrees of warming that will make current food and water issues seem like the good old days.



The collapse of the Greenland Ice sheet and the West Antarctic Ice sheets represent about 15 meters of sea level rise. The savannahisation of the Amazon represents the destruction of half the world's rainforest and 30% of it's species.

It doesn't bear thinking about.


(Figures are hyperlinks to their source documents)

[BoredWombat]

Originally Posted by rc white

The probability of a second Venus is by research I have seen remote but we don't have to go very far towards it for human life to be untenable on this planet.

I don't think that you could make a Venus by burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels were once trees, so this carbon that we are releasing into the atmosphere was once in the biosphere.

We're simply turning the climate back to what it was when all the coal and oil were trees. Perhaps 2 or 3 hundred million years ago.

Well maybe a bit hotter because there are also less trees now.

[isenhand]

Originally Posted by rc white

Money as such is not the cause of any of our woes it is the definition of money.

Good point. So, if we want a sustainable society we would need a method of exchange that actually reflects the resources in society? We can then see our socioeconomic system as a resource allocation system.

.ui