May 2013 Atmospheric CO2 Concentration 399.89 ppm; May 2012 396.87; May 2011 394.29

[hatrack]

http://co2now.org/

[Gregorian]

1. The concept western civilization needs to start thinking about is "not doing".

Just don't do it. I guess that would be my motto. The world looked infinitely large to us not long ago. Now it's looking pretty small. And as such, instead of just doing stuff, it's time to just not do stuff. A very distasteful thought for those who like to shop til they drop.

[hatrack]

2. Shorter version: "Don't just DO something - stand there!!"

[Gregorian]

5. My best friend back in 1972 had that very bumper sticker.

[wtmusic]

3. Can we put "reproducing" at the top of the "not doing" list? nt

[Gregorian]

4. You must be a mind reader.

I dare not even mention it anymore. It's just too touchy a subject.

I guess I'm just calling it responsible behavior now.

[CreekDog]

12. how do you reduce population growth?

that's why it's a touchy subject.

*how* do you do it?

[GliderGuider]

21. "You" don't, of course.

Individual choices and decisions have very little impact on collective events. The two exist at different levels and are subject to different rules. Population decline, like all forms of degrowth, can't come about through individual action, because so few people are able to make decisions like that.

What I think is that we probably have “free will” as individuals, but that as our collectivities become larger, the collective behaviour becomes statistically deterministic. We have something in common with gas molecules that way. An individual gas molecule doesn’t have a temperature or a pressure, it has a position and a velocity. When you put a large number of molecules together, each of them still has a position and a velocity, but the aggregate now has a temperature and a pressure, as a result of all those positions and velocities adding up statistically.

Temperature and pressure are statistically deterministic, and depend on the number of gas molecules, the size of the space they’re confined in, and the energy fed into the gas. Similarly, the behaviour of human civilization is statistically deterministic, and depends on the number of people (7 billion, and the more people there are the more deterministic the behavior becomes), the finite space we’re confined in (i.e. the surface of the planet) and the amount of energy flowing into the system (~18 terawatts at last estimate).

One reason we’re susceptible to statistically deterministic behaviour is that we don’t realize that most of our brain power is devoted to removing limits. we have a very hard time placing inits on ourselves – the exact situation one would expect from an organism that evolved to be a very effective gradient dissipator.

So it’s not strict determinism, but like anything else in the universe our free will has limits. It’s just that we evolved to be blind to those limits in order to become better thermodynamically dissipative structures. Degrowth of any sort can only happen on a global basis as the result of hitting a limit we can't figure out a way to defeat.

[CreekDog]

23. I think that answer is too long --you/I/we reduce population growth by increasing standard of living

and by making family planning available.

you are making it sound difficult because what you are getting at are two aspects of human nature that one is not going to contain.

but when people aren't poor and when people can control their reproduction, on average, birth rates decline significantly.

and that's all it really takes.

my two cents, but i'm not alone!

[NickB79]

24. The problem lies in our definition of "standard of living"

It is now assumed around the world that the only way to increase standards of living is through an emulation of a resource-intensive society like what we see in North America or Europe. You end up with a slower-growing population, but a far higher rate of personal consumption that offsets much of the gains you make.

What we need is a new concept of what a high standard of living truly means, separate from the current consumption-based economic model it's based upon now.

[CreekDog]

25. that's not true --birth rates decline in societies with out western style consumption

mere increases in sustenance and family planning reduce birth rates almost immediately.

do you acknowledge that?

[NickB79]

28. Yes, they do decline, just not enough to save our skins

I'm of the opinion that we're probably about 2-3 billion people over carrying capacity on this planet, and that the only way to ensure the long-term survival of our civilization depends on getting our population down to around 4-5 billion.

Cutting your birth rate from 5.0 to 3.0 in a non-Westernized nation is a great achievement; it just isn't enough of one.

When we can get the global average birthrate down BELOW replacement level, then we're getting somewhere. As it stands, we're not expected to reach this point until around 2050 or so, at which point we'll have pretty much already pushed this planet beyond the breaking point WRT it's ability to sustain a global human civilization like we have today.

[GliderGuider]

26. No, you're not alone.

Most people, especially those on a political board, accept the idea that individual actions determine the collective outcome. I mean, it's just obvious, right? I'm now pretty sure this is just another flat-earth mistake born of misinterpreted perceptions, though. It falls in the same category as the Sun revolving around the Earth.

The realization that human behaviour is limited by hard-to-perceive physical principles is simply a completion of the Copernican/Galilean revolution. No matter how many people would prefer that it not be so, and therefore decline to look through the telescope.

Population is a case in point. The main driver of actual population reduction (as opposed to merely slowing its growth) is economic collapse a la Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR. Even simply slowing its growth requires enriching the world's population, and there aren't enough resources to manage that for the whole planet. We'll try, of course, and kill the planet in the process - which will bring about population reduction.

I've seen no evidence that education alone acts to reduce the population of impoverished countries. Poor countries are usually trying too hard to grow in order to become rich.

World population along with material consumption and the expansion of technology are the main growth factors that are controlled by the second law of thermodynamics.

[CreekDog]

27. let me ask, would you want economic collapse such as happened in the Eastern Block?

in order to get population reduction?

i don't want that.

not when education improves standards of living, increases health, empowers women, and as a byproduct, reduces the birthrate with even small investments.

if one is going to keep people uneducated and impoverished to avoid population growth as a means of saving the world --that's incredibly amoral. i think some environmentalists, in first world countries sometimes think this is the moral thing. it's not.

[Nihil]

29. Remember: "Morals" are subjective.

They do not exist in a vacuum and are modified by time & circumstances.

Personally, no, I do *not* believe that "keeping people uneducated and impoverished to
avoid population growth" is the right ("moral&quot thing to do but neither do I see the opposite
as providing sufficient change in the tight timescale that is required.

No, I do not have an answer for "So what do we do then?" - just wanted to point out that
throwing around the words "moral" & "amoral" are not beneficial here.

[GliderGuider]

32. No, I don't "want" it, but I don't think it can be avoided.

Regarding education, whether of women or any/everyone else, we should do that because it's a good thing to do, not with any expectation of controlling population growth. We should understand that making people richer and better educated will probably accelerate planetary damage rather than reduce it, but we should do it anyway because it's a good thing. Unfortunately the road to planetary hell has ben paved with such good intentions for the last 50,000 years, and that aspect of reality isn't about to change now.

Population reduction is coming no matter what we do or don't do, so let's do things that we feel good about.

Regarding impoverishment driving population reduction per the Demographic Transition Theory, keep in mind that what we're trying to avoid isn't overpopulation per se, but human damage to the planet. As Ehrlich and Holdern noticed, human impact is the multiplicative product of our numbers times our individual activity levels (I=P*AT where AT represents our activity). If we reduce P by increasing AT we are unlikely to reduce I in the process. That would be the same as expecting the area of a rectangle to diminish if we cut its length in half but double its width...

The Demographic Transition Theory is sometimes called the "Benign Demographic Transition Theory". From the viewpoint of the planetary ecosphere as a whole, there's nothing even remotely "benign" about it.

[Socialistlemur]

6. The concentration. Of CO2 in the air is 400 ppm

A reasonable estimate of further increases says we will be at 800 ppm by the end of the century. This is, according to what I consider a reliable estimate, going to lead to about 1.6 degrees C warmer temperatures. As a result the atmosphere will be more humid, there will be more vegetation cover, it will rain more where it rains now, and rain less where it rains little. The ocean will warm, the Arctic ice will be much smaller and thinner, and the ocean acidity will increase but it will not reach undersaturated conditions except possibly in the Arctic Ocean.

Sea level will increase a bit as well.

I think it's more sensible to discuss what one thinks will happen rather than show a plot. If there were no greenhouse effect, given that more CO2 helps plants I wouldn't be too worried.

[hatrack]

7. However, since there IS a greenhouse effect, and CO2 only helps plants up to a point . . .

. . . that is, plant growth may speed up, but only temporarily at the cost of burning through available nutrients (as Duke University studies on radiata pine in elevated CO2 atmospheres showed years ago), we are called upon to worry.

BTW, the Arctic sea ice is already substantially "smaller and thinner" than it was at the end of the 1970s - as in more than 80% of the sea ice then present has disappeared.

Your general lack of concern is soothing, but at the moment, further soothing is not what's needed.

[Socialistlemur]

8. I like to be soothing

I don't like the panic-hysteria approach...

Plant growth and Vegetation cover does continue as the CO2 content increases. Weather models include this effect in the carbon sink estimates...the better models include nutrient limitations, but nutrients are continuously being eroded or made.

I'm aware of the Arctic ice status. I'm not worried about it because it's to be expected. I don't see what's the big deal, Arctic ice has been disappearing for a long time. Does anybody think its still there?

So you see, when you discuss these impacts you really do need to get into the fine print. Why would you worry about arctic ice? Do you fear albedo changes? That's included in the models.

So the question becomes, do you object to the estimated time to doubling i used? Or to the transient climate response? I'm using data I'm sure will be used in the forthcoming iPCC report.

[hatrack]

9. Your signature line says more than you know - goodbye.

nt

[NickB79]

15. Remember a couple of years ago, when the Arctic melt really accelerated?

And here at E/E we asked ourselves how the deniers would spin an ice-free Arctic so as to not upset their worldview? A few of the most cynical here hypothesized that they'd just start claiming it was perfectly normal for the Arctic to be ice-free, that it proved nothing, and it was no big deal if all that ice melted away anyway.

And so it begins.......

[GliderGuider]

10. The world's most abundant renewable resource

is denial.

Interview with David Roberts

One thing that social scientists keep discovering — and left-brain, hyper-rational people keep ignoring — is that information and emotion are not two separate processes in the brain. All learning, all reasoning, takes place in the context of an emotional or affective frame. Indeed, they would be impossible without those frames, because those frames provide focus, meaning, and goals.

One of the great problems with climate change is that most people have no emotional context for it. There are very few points where it intersects with people’s daily lives, their worries or their aspirations. It is almost entirely abstract, just a set of inert facts. And it turns out people cannot be moved or motivated by inert facts. Such facts just get compartmentalized.

Some people can get it, and some can't.
So it goes...

[Socialistlemur]

13. I agree

I have a copy of the forthcoming AR5 right here. I do have some questions regarding its contents but I'm willing to wait for the official release. What I've read thus far tells me there's no need to panic, but I see many of you deny the simple observation that the world stopped warming about 14 years ago. This means we have tie to figure out things much better, rather than rush.

[NickB79]

14. "the world stopped warming about 14 years ago"

http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/no-global-warming-hasnt-stopped-121017.htm

As the Met Office pointed out in December 2009, “the first decade of this century has been, by far, the warmest decade on the instrumental record.”

and

http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html

Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This is because about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.

Now that you've outed yourself as a denier troll, what would you like on your tombstone?

[Socialistlemur]

17. Actually those statements may be wrong.

From a purely math standpoint, the first statement is sheer baloney. If temperature was increasing and then leveled off, the result is simple: the temperature is steady and not increasing. If one uses a running average of course one can see a change in slope of the temperature versus time line. But this statement is used by individuals who want to disguise the simple fact that temperatures have stopped climbing for many years.

I agree the ocean is warming. Those of us who understand the process realize there's a slow warming of the deep ocean taking place. But I consider the ocean to be a heat sink because it would take over a thousand years to reach equilibrium.

The second statement is of course unsupported. There is no way to prove the thesis - the author lacks the data. You see, I have information which goes into much more detail than you seem to have. I also happen to understand the underlying physics and oceanography.

My original point still stands. There's no need to panic because we have gained about 15 years due to the somewhat unexplained lack of warming. I say somewhat because some have already worked on this subject and have proposed ideas. But I see I'm dealing with quasi-religious fanatics therefore I'd rather not waste my time.

[hatrack]

19. No, you are going to stop wasting OUR time - your denier troll bullshit is no longer needed here

You are banned. Goodbye.

[Nihil]

20. Thank you.

[sikofit3]

22. Thank you!!!!!

[CRH]

30. +1000 Thank You hatrack. n/t

[hatrack]

31. Thanks for your support, y'all . . .

If there's going to be one corner of the Internet free of "no warming in the past 14 years blahblahblah look at this graph blahblahblah I was reading on Watts Up With That blahblahblah", this is going to be the place.

[GliderGuider]

16. "The world" did not actually stop warming 14 years ago.

The surface air temperature rise may have slowed, but the oceans kept heating. The oceans are part of "the world", yes?
Nobody on here denies this.

Oceans are absorbing excess heat, for now

Studies of ocean temperatures are revealing that a lot of the excess heat we’re creating by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is ending up in the oceans.

A new paper published in Nature Climate Change by scientists from Spain and France identified where much of the missing heat had ended up:

Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700?[meters] of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown.

Lead author Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Barcelona said the hidden heat may return to the atmosphere in the next decade, stoking warming again.

Care to try again?

[Socialistlemur]

18. Indeed the ocean absorbs heat

Anybody with a lick of common sense can understand the ocean does absorb heat. However heat absorption didn't kick in suddenly to stop the global warming trend on its tracks? Or did it? In a simple world warmer air will in turn warm the underlying ocean. Therefore the ocean has always been a heat sink, or a heat source when the air is cooler. Heat transfer to deeper water is altered by stratification, currents, evaporation rates, fresh water inflows, and of course temperature. But there's no ready answer to the mystery yet.

...Let me go over this point again....In other words, the ocean has always been a heat sink. Do you think the process was suspended by magic and restarted about 13 to 14 years ago?

I realize popular blogs and writers try to convince you everything is well, but the recent trend did alter the warming projections in AR5 versus AR4, and I happen to think of this as an evolving situation. I'd rather keep the politics out of the discussion, but it's hard to discuss science with people who have a nearly religious hysteria controlling what they wish to discuss. The insults your buddies use against me don't bother too much, but they sure take away from the discussion.

[tardybar]

11. environment

They keep destroying our green spaces for housing messing up the environment. They tore out trees for changes in the expressway. Here in Staten Island we have a petition to save an old retreat. It is a ready made park. go to http://savemountmanresa.com Sign the petition help us to save some green space in Staten Island.