The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just completed their report how human activity affects our climate. The bottom line is this: if we humans do not change our behavior right now, there will be irreversible damage to our environment in the near future.
The United States military is putting together a strategic plan to try and handle the situation. If the military is convinced there is a problem, you know it’s not a hoax. Have you noticed in your local grocery store that food prices are going up? If the drought continues, expect prices to soar. Many Americans are already living paycheck-to-paycheck. Many Americans have trouble feeding their families right now. What would happen if food prices doubled? Can your household budget handle that?
California and the Mid West are in a drought and so are many countries around the world. We can’t grow food in drought conditions. What do you think happens when people are hungry? Effects of climate change may already be showing up in terms of global conflict. The fight between the have’s and the have-nots. Will the U.S. military be called in to settle the dispute?
Could the problems in Syria be caused by a drought? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman traveled to Syria to investigate if a long-running drought has contributed to their fighting.
In a recent interview with the blog Responding to Climate Change, retired Army Brig. Gen. Chris King laid out the military’s thinking on climate change:
“This is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years. That’s the scariest thing for us,” he told RTCC. “There is no exit strategy that is available for many of the problems. You can see in military history, when they don’t have fixed durations, that’s when you’re most likely to not win.”
The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. Hiding beneath the ice is methane gas. Methane gas contributes to global warming (climate change) and causes the earth to warm up faster. It becomes a vicious cycle. The hotter the planet, the faster the ice melts. Melting ice causes sea levels to rise. People living by the sea will look elsewhere to live. Where will all the retirees living in Miami go? Miami is below sea level already.
The world’s population is growing. The world’s resources are shrinking. Remember the catastrophic events back east? What do you think will happen, if this becomes a common event? Do you think the citizens back there will be happy about that? Who do you think they will blame? Can you say “civil unrest?” Will our troops be used to “put a lid on it” right here in the U.S.?
Who will win the coming “water wars” right here in California? Will it be big oil or farmers? If the drought continues, the price for fresh fruits and vegetables will be much higher. The cost of beef is already up 4% due to the 2012 drought in Texas and Oklahoma. I haven’t bought meat in years because I choose not to. But if I wanted to, I couldn’t anyway because I can’t afford it.
Droughts affect our exports. If the fields are dried up, there is nothing to sell to other countries. Many farmers depend on exporting their food products to make their living. Who will bail them out? Climate change will impact our economy. If we have nothing to sell, people will lose their jobs. If people don’t have jobs, they won’t have money. Get my drift?
Climate change affects our imports as well because all the problems I just wrote about is a global issue, which takes me back to — lack of food. Hungry people do desperate things. Can you say “civil unrest?”
The time to debate whether climate change is made by human activity is over. The military is convinced. Are you?
Sources:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/04/david_titley_climate_change_war_an_interview_with_the_retired_rear_admiral.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/california-drought/droughts-worldwide-may-have-effect-american-dinner-plates-n58756
Relax, the sky isn’t falling, Gorebal warming isn’t proven nor are all the science community in agreement with the concept of man made global warming.
The military has plans for the most ridiculous shit in the world!
Things that they don’t think will ever happen. It’s a form of readiness training and it gives all those generals in the pentagon something to do besides plan the next real world war. It also gives them fodder to expand their budgets. They have plans for a wide scale alien invasion too, odds of which are slim to…? Please, calm down.
Even if we are in a warming trend, which we may be, increased temperatures and increased carbon dioxide will help us grow more plants faster to feed the growing masses in Africa and Asia.
The planet has been both warmer and colder than we have known during our short period of time man has ruled it. I don’t expect it will not keep changing since we are in an interglacial period.
Climate and temperatures on Earth are constantly in flux. The ONLY thing constant in nature is change. These idiots who think they can drive climate one way or another can’t make accurate predictions of what going to happen 6-12 months from now.
Just look at the long range reports from NOAA and compare it to what happens. These are the best guys in the world and they don’t get it right most of the time.
Ask someone in upstate NY or VT this year, what they think about global warming, sorry climate change… well…Why did they change the name? Why are a lot of the predictions not working out?
Why did several of the scientists named in the IPCC report quit when they didn’t the revisions in the draft, that they authored and was edited to more inflammatory language?
Why is it that scientific methods are being ignored by an international political body?
Why is it that anyone who questions or has doubts about the raw data and the computer models called childish names and dismissed as being an idiot, right wing, whatever. TRUTH INVITES QUESTION! So does scientific method. Honesty and reproduction of evidence is at the heart of scientific method, along with open discussion.
This isn’t about being better stewards, this is about power and money, pure and simple.
Should we be better stewards of planet Earth? Hell yes! But the IPCC is full of crap.
Next winter we will have an El nino and record rainfall if the models keep holding true. Since it’s the mid Pacific region that’s the source of most of our local rain, we will probably have more than we can handle by then.
Carl, could you provide the references that the IPCC report is non-scientific and full of crap?
According to a wide spectrum of people, this is what is happening: “There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/opinion/a-republican-case-for-climate-action.html?_r=0
Please cease and desist, Carl. The world isn’t six thousand years old, either.
I’ve only been studying the arguments since 1973 or-74 so my time frame is pretty short in this entire discussion.I willing to admit I’m wrong, let’s see how it works out.
6,000 years is a blink to the time frame of Earth and we as humans are very short sighted and pretty self aggrandizing in our perspective of our powers and abilities.
If you really want to learn about the matter there are plenty of places to learn about it. You could spend the next 20 years learning and still be confused.
I don’t have to be a biologist or a geneticist or a paleontologist to grasp the concepts of evolution and geologic time; or an astrophysicist to ponder the vastness of the universe(s). I could ponder these sciences for decades, too, without much point.
The earth is getting warmer and human industrial activity is helping it along – if not absolutely causing it.
I’m not at all sure about that point David.
I’m not as concerned about climate change as I am about other pollution issues and other things like the health of natural fisheries.
Some of us think that tectonics, solar radiation, and ocean current changes are the causative forces in melting ice in some areas of the planet. Those changes in tectonics and ocean currents aren’t something we can do anything about.
There’s also evidence that CFC’s may be a much bigger culprit in this than anything else. The decreases in world wide production actually make sense when compared to actual data measurements. In that regard we have turned a corner to some degree but there are still CFC’s being produced in the world, just not as much.
There are huge issues with basic weather data comparisons especially when it comes to historic documentation. It stems from the comparison of analog vs digital information and the standards involved in what is a certifiable weather reporting station in reporting observations for both methods.
Airports are heat sinks and they all have pretty good weather reporting stations because they need that information but they make very bad places to make comparative observations if you are looking for weather trends. They never the less get thrown into the mix when data and observations are used in climate studies.
Denver airport now vs Denver airport 20 years ago aren’t going to be apples and apples, they aren’t even physically close to each other and that’s just one easy example.
There’s also the decline of the quality of scientific studies that is ravaging the scientific community at large. It’s become an epidemic in their midst. That problem is rampant in every scientific community and the subject of an increasing number of scientists. I’m not at all sure how you fix that other than verification by non biased colleges. Where you get those isn’t always apparent either. Everyone is grabbing for the same allotments for funding so they often have axes to grind.
It’s not as simple or easy as anyone would like and in my humble opion most of it revolves around money and power, but prestige certainly plays a role in it too.
Again, we should be better stewards, make no assumptions that I’m not in favor of man cleaning up the house after ourselves, just do it intelligently. This is not inconsistent with what I have always said here before.
I still think the IPCC is as full of crap as a Christmas goose and the sky isn’t falling…unless you count that meteor strikes and in that case, well, it has been for a very long time…since the planet started to form.
If the world powers fire all of their nukes into the Sun and put it out, then the earth can freeze in place.
or maybe nuke powered jet engines and force the earth code to stop it rotation, the earth can fry in place.
Rob,
The entire planets nukes pale in comparison to the energy output of the sun on just one day.
I know Carl.
It surprises me that some could think that man, Americans, can effect the earth anywhere close to the effects that the Sun, earth’s core, or the moon have.
Yes and that solar radiation would turns the earth into toast without the atmosphere we seem determined to alter.
Just found this- FWIW
http://news.yahoo.com/california-drought-big-money-many-actors-little-oversight-110415148–finance.html
*Geo-orginisms are borne grow to maturity, die, rot, create methane gas, poisons the seas, poisons the water supply, evaporates, leaves poison bacteria which dies eventually, causing mutated disease which will not die. Right now, Monsanto has created seeds that kill all insects including bees and butterflies and which started out with 10% of ingrained pesticide….to today with almost 60% made of pesticide. This pollutes our food supply, kills the various lifeforms or mutates them into something never intended by the creator.
No biggie, just think on it this way. You take a VW bug, put four grown adults into it and sink it in a lake. How long will the airtight VW support life? 20 minutes! OK, now put 15 grown adults in the same VW Bug and sink it in the lake. How long will all 15 folks live before they run out of air and breathe nothing but CO2? 1 minute and 30 seconds… maybe! Is there unlimited air in our world? For 100 Billion people?
http://www.livescience.com/37055-greenhouse-gas-desert-plants-growing.html
“Between 1982 and 2010, leaf cover on plants rose by 11 percent in arid areas, including the southwestern United States, Australia’s Outback, the Middle East and some parts of Africa, the study found. The results were published May 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The research confirms a long-held suspicion that one of the side effects of global warming will be lusher plant life. Plants pull carbon dioxide from the air — the gas is part of a chemical process called photosynthesis that plants use to make food….”
Even this more upbeat story makes a misstatement here, it’s a rise in CO2 not the temperature involved in this process. The basic truth here is that most, if not all plants will grow better in a richer CO2 environment.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614097/Top-climate-experts-sensational-claim-government-meddling-crucial-UN-report.html
Here’s what I was talking about, the IPCC report being full of crap.
“A top US academic has dramatically revealed how government officials forced him to change a hugely influential scientific report on climate change to suit their own interests.
Harvard professor Robert Stavins electrified the worldwide debate on climate change on Friday by sensationally publishing a letter online in which he spelled out the astonishing interference.”
@ Carl Overmeyer: Even if you are right, and this is all just natural variations over time, a conservative principal is to conserve resources, not blow through them at a rate far exceeding their provenance through nature. Thanks to my long consideration of this situation I do doubt you are right.
But to take your position for argumentation sake: The results of humanity’s binge on fossil fuels is twofold. Thanks to those fuels there are a lot more of us here on the planet than when I was born in 1942, consuming ever more and living ever better through the fertilizers provided by them (Chinese buying Chinese built cars aplenty to replace those millions of bicycles) . This too is a natural cycle with a down side coming. Would it not be prudent to leave those fossils in place in case those Solar Cycles bring us another ” Ice Age”resulting in a die-off of a substantial fraction of our species? We would be able to at least stand a chance to sustain the remainder through that dip in the temperature curve making all human existence quite miserable. Survival of a comet/asteroid strike or even a nuclear war over the diminishing ocean resources you claim to care about would also depend upon rational conservation of fossilized stored solar energy resources. This is my argument for why we need to stop this experiment in testing the holding capacity of the earth’s atmosphere and learn to live within our solar budget.