Originally Posted by Nimrod Yaffle

Ok everyone, FYI, I am suspended. I have been sent the a sim call 'The Corn Field' and it *really* sucks! There's corn all over, with a sloooww tractor you can ride around, I found a TV, and pushed play, and it plays a show called 'Boy in Court'. Kind of funny, but it's no fly, and there's corn..... everywhere...

Originally Posted by Bard Jameson

Run for the coasts while there's still time!

(Not TOO close to the coasts, though - rising sea levels and all that )

Originally Posted by Cindy Claveau

I doubt I'll still be around in 2100. That's when the article predicted the 10 degree rise.

Originally Posted by Harvey Swenson

Governments won't take it seriously until it's way too late (if it's not already). There's far too much profit destroying the planet.

Originally Posted by Cindy Claveau

Don't be so sure. There's also profit in new technology. Think "forced obsolescence", something the automakers have been living off of for decades.

Whether the climate change is manmade or not (or to what percent), I am very hopeful that our footprint will be drastically reduced in the next couple of decades. That's when scientists think we should have fusion power ready to use - a virtually unlimited, remarkably clean source of energy that could essentially solve our major power grid requirements.

Originally Posted by Cindy Claveau

Yeh, you laugh now!

Originally Posted by Trout Recreant

I hereby pronounce you the Grand Holy Flayer of Flesh, Inducer of Howls and Eternal Crusher of Dreams

Originally Posted by Cindy Claveau

Yeh, you laugh now!

Originally Posted by Surreal

Worry more about the wheat crop.

Originally Posted by http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=17726

The question for policy-makers and society is “Will the ocean continue to take up anthropogenic CO2?” Our best evidence is that it will—but less effectively because of interactions between the ocean and the evolving climate.

Several factors come into play. Global warming will inevitably cause seawater temperatures to rise. Warmer water holds less dissolved gas than colder water, so the ocean will not be able to store as much anthropogenic CO2.

A warmer climate will also melt ice and increase rainfall near the poles, adding fresh water to the ocean. Fresh water is more buoyant than saltier water and “floats” on top of it, stratifying the ocean and slowing the mixing and circulation that transports anthropogenic CO2 away from the surface and into reservoirs in the deep ocean. The net effect will be even higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and a further acceleration of global warming.

Warmer temperatures, weaker circulation, and different stratification of the ocean will have impacts on marine life and ecosystems, which in turn could affect the ocean’s ability to store carbon. How these changes may occur is not clear at this point, however, and may vary from region to region.

A more acidic ocean
The increasing amount of carbon in the ocean will cause another problem for marine life: ocean acidification. The 3-percent increase in dissolved carbon in surface water may seem small, but it is enough to significantly alter the chemistry of seawater and threaten whole groups of marine life.

The reason involves some basic chemistry. When CO2 gas dissolves in seawater, it combines with water molecules (H2O) to form carbonic acid (H2CO3). The acid releases hydrogen ions into the water. The more hydrogen ions in a solution, the more acidic it becomes. Hydrogen ions in ocean surface waters are now 25 percent higher than in the pre-industrial era, with an additional 75-percent increase projected by 2100.

A carbon-containing mineral, calcium carbonate (CaCO3), is a vital component in the ocean, used by many marine creatures to build protective shells and hard structures. Coral reefs, for example, are the accumulation of calcium carbonate skeletons secreted by small coral polyps.

Calcium carbonate shells are also used by several groups of planktonic organisms, microscopic floating plants and animals that are critical and abundant components of the marine food web. The white chalk cliffs of Dover, for example, are made out of empty shells that sank to the bottom of the sea when these organisms died.

The problem is, acidic conditions are corrosive to already formed calcium carbonate, and they also make it harder for organisms to build such hard parts in the first place.

Consequences for marine life
Will corals and shell-forming plankton be able to adapt to a high-CO2 world? We do not know for certain, but preliminary evidence from laboratory and field experiments is not encouraging.

Higher acidity has a negative impact on almost every species examined. In some experiments, you can actually watch the shells of living organisms dissolve away with time.

Especially vulnerable are small marine snails called pteropods and deep-water corals that live in high latitudes, where colder waters have already become more acidic. These species play critical roles in their ecosystems—as food or habitat for other creatures—so the impact of ocean acidification may soon extend to other marine life, including fish and marine mammals.

If you mention “climate change” to people, it often conjures up images of heat waves, melting glaciers, hurricanes, droughts, and monsoon rains—certainly not changes in the ocean, its chemistry, and tiny plankton inhabitants. But we know that future climate change will largely depend on the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the sea—and how vulnerable they are to human perturbation. Understanding how carbon cycles through the Earth system is key to unraveling vital questions about our climate.

Some policy-makers and entrepreneurs have even proposed injecting carbon dioxide into the deep ocean to sequester it from the atmosphere. Ocean carbon-monitoring projects such as the work on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown contribute vital data to learn about the ocean’s changing chemistry. Other methods, including experiments that use numerical modeling to form predictions and studies on how ocean acidification affects ocean life, must inform our decisions on how tightly we may want to regulate carbon emissions.

Originally Posted by Surreal

Oh I figured the ocean was a lost cause. I think we passed the tipping point already.

Originally Posted by Colette Meiji

In other words .. is the entire human race on its way to earning a Darwin Award for stupidly causing its own extinction?

Originally Posted by Bard Jameson

To do so would require proof that "the human race" as a whole, had a sort of "hive mind" that could, quite miraculously IMO, predict with unerring accuracy the consequences inherent in the actions of what is, in reality, two-to-six billion people doing everything they can to ensure their individual and familial survival.

Darwin Awards celebrate actions of individuals that can quite easily be labeled stupid, such as diving off a three story rooftop into a wading pool in an attempt to impress one's friends, and dying in the attempt.

To ascribe such to the human race as a whole is, IMO, to condemn the actions of billions of individuals who have, for millenia, done the best they can to survive. Seems a bit much, to me, as if I could say that everything I have ever done in my lifetime, or will EVER do, must be in accordance with some larger principle that few, if any, individuals can fathom.

Originally Posted by Colette Meiji

I think the point was more along the lines of .. the World lacking the political will to stop its own extinction even after it recognized the mechanism that would cause it.

Whether or not its really "stupid" is moot in totality- since if it does happen, no one will be around to debate whether a human extinction actually qualifies.

Originally Posted by Bard Jameson

Maybe you are giving too much credence to the idea that "The World" recognized the mechanism that would cause it. Even in light of all the seemingly incontrovertible evidence of human activity that "causes" global warming, "climate change" or whatever we call it, to think that "political will" is the answer to the problem is, IMO, a bit short sighted.

"Political will", if I maybe so bold, translates ultimately into enforcement by one segment of society upon another. If one calls for enforcement of such will, one cannot escape knowing that individuals must be forced, by legal sanctions and failing that, by sheer force of arms, to change their behaviors in ways that accord with what the political classes have determined is proper.

To bring it down to a small example - merely burning wood releases greenhouse gasses into the air. While that in itself has not been a major problem in the past, if all 6 billion individuals on the planet were reduced to wood burning tomorrow for heat, light, cooking, etc. - it could still represent a significant affect on the ability of the planet to handle carbon uptake.

So, even given the "political will" to reduce carbon emissions from factories, vehicles, etc, I believe one has to take into account what it can ultimately come down to - that the survival strategies that 6 billion people employ would be subject to an over-arching authority. Whenever I consider that as a possibility, I wonder not only a) what is the certainty of the science that informs the political restrictions?, b) what mechanisms can be put in place to grant authority for those political restrictions?, and c) how, in what practical methods, can those political restrictions be enforced in such a way that does not deny individuals the right and ability to survive, even if those survival strategies on the individual level have deleterious effects on the whole?.

I have no answers, only questions. I merely say that statements condemning the entire human race for befouling their nests - as almost all living creatures do in some circumstances - are short-sighted and lack a broader perspective.