global warming

[Scouse Gits]

Aaah bottle count - that only applies on Friday evenings (well nearly only)

As my daughter SG{3} never ceases to tell me - my sense of humour contains no sense and very little humour.

However, I feel that I am the life and soul of any party - strange that isn't it?

SG[1]

[Julius Brenzaida]

Well, this discussion has turned from global warming to global insulting and global drunking
The heat is on

[La Fayette]

Julius
Better fight smash than throwing insults .
What is your fight against smash? MP duel or what?

[Scouse Gits]

IIRC chess in 'Other Games'

SG[1] -- stone cold ...

[bellisaurius]

Yeah I read C&E, GP. It is kind of mushy, but they're predominantlly chemists, so I let it slide. There's been an interesting set of letters to the editor in CEP (the engineering counterpart) magazine over the last few months that have shown there are still many factors to consider in the discussion, such as the fact that the partial pressures of CO2 in the ocean are still well below stauration, so the fugacity idicates a lot of CO2 can still be absorbed.

Little things like this are what the law of unitended consequences is about.

[bellisaurius]

Geez, I'm a horrible speller.

[JCP]

Back to the topics (if it is allowed) :
I encounter global warning several times in gaming Civ 2.
Sometimes, I had many warnings, sometimes only one before effects.
On a large map, effects are spectacular : the map is sweeped by lanes which changes ground tiles (about one tile among three or four) : forest or plain to desert, grassland to plain... and costal areas to swamp !
On a continental well irigated country, the effects may be worst for AI than for Human player.
But in a archipelago or for a country with several islands, the instant effect is very damaging and may conduct costal cities to starving, unless having a lot of engineers.

If I have allies, they sometimes spontaneously help to clean my polluted tiles.
But in case of nuclear tactic war with equal forces, I cannot bring engineers to clean on the front line, and pollution involve irremedially to global world warning, even several times !

Now, let's derive as the link : in the real world, global warning is a fact, and the causes are, as in the game, human activities (industry, population and tranport).
But about a nuclear war, many expert during cold war spoke of the "nuclear night" or the "nuclear winter", with cold weather rather than hot one.. and all of them conclude to the turning into a desert.
As said in the link, it is true that the world alternate in the past between cold and warm athmospheres, but these variations was at the scale of geological eras. The new thing with human activity effects today is that our world is changing in a two digit period (less than a century). The "sudden" disappearance of dinosaurs takes place during billons years ; it was sudden at the scale of the secondary era !
In conclusion, humankind has to react quickly, and Kyoto Protocol is a little step of what we have to do ... if this little step maynot be acted by those who pretends to lead the world ...

[Straybow]

SGs, obviously Apolyton needs to add :bottle: to the smilies.

Marcos, Dan, get with it!

[Straybow]

Restrained by laser beams from Ming's eyes

Hi JCP! Now that we're introduced I can assault you viciously with my capitalist propaganda.

European politicians have been mouthing support for Kyoto just so they look good amongst the intelligensia and the Greenpeace types. Somebody else already pointed out that only one country has ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Bulgaria, I think). In that respect USA is leading, and the world is following.

I don't know how conclusive such studies can be, but many paleogeologists believe that at times the Earth had no permanent ice masses and little seasonal polar ice. There is absolutely no indication, by any credible science, that climate change of that magnitude is anticipated. We are still in an interglacial period within an "ice age."

Also mentioned before, the Little Optimum was warmer than the present climate. Following that was the Little Ice Age, with incursions of Alpine glaciers beyond all historical records or signs. Neither of these climate swings was due to the miniscule effect of the plague-ravaged preindustrial human population.

The current warming period began at least 150 years ago. The IPCC only shows about 1½° C of warming in the past 75 years, and only a fraction of that is ascribed to anthropogenic gasses. They assert that a sharp upswing in the 1990s was due to some generalized human causes.

Various researchers have shown the misrepresentations in that data, which made no adjustment for the warming effect as the high altitude particulates from Mt. Pinatubo dissipated in '93-'94. Also, "new" urban areas that arose in the last 40-50 years were not adjusted or excluded for heat island affects as more established urban areas were.

Similarly, the UV data leans heavily on a 5 year study of Winter vs Summer UV levels in Toronto, Canada. The entire upward "trend" is contained in four days at the very end of the study, March 18-21, 1993. That alone would be a statistical "red flag" calling for a more careful analysis to eliminate false trending.

There is more to the story, though. That was the weekend of the notorious winter storm that stretched from Florida to Canada with record snowfalls and low temperatures. Massive, persistent disturbances of the like are known to bring increased UV penetration, which quickly returns to normal after the systems break up.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics abound. On top of that we've got doofuses like Al Gore conflating El Niño cycles with global warming, irregular cycles that have persisted more than five centuries. On the other hand, it seems that the Little Optimum coincided with a period without the El Niño cycle. If anything I'd guess that as long as we see the cycle, "global warming" is not in the works.

Even with global warming the effects shown in archeological records do not reveal drastic results. On the one hand, a little digging in the alpha.txt file shows how to defang gw in SMAC. I only wish it were so easy in Civ2.

[Scouse Gits]

Originally posted by StrayBow
On the one hand, a little digging in the alpha.txt file shows how to defang gw in SMAC. I only wish it were so easy in Civ2.

A beautifully elegant deflection of said Kermit Lasers ...

SG[1]

[Campo]

Straybow,

European politicians have been mouthing support for Kyoto just so they look good amongst the intelligensia and the Greenpeace types.

That seems like an overly harsh assessment. Do you have any evidence to back it?

Somebody else already pointed out that only one country has ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Bulgaria, I think). In that respect USA is leading, and the world is following.

Kyoto would have widespread adoption if the U.S. hadn't pulled out. When the country that produces -- what, more than a quarter of the world's total pollution? -- isn't onboard, what's the point of the others restricting themselves?

On top of that we've got doofuses like Al Gore

Your political agenda diffuses the effectiveness of your scientific case. It seems to me that you're guilty of the same "crime" that you accuse the other side of -- letting political bias determine scientific conclusions.

Even with global warming the effects shown in archeological records do not reveal drastic results.

Two points:
First, the previous effect of global warming (whatever it was) does not necessarily relate to the future effect. Climatic and geological changes could mean that future global warming could be milder or harsher. Past records are not precise future predictors.
Second, even "gentle" changes in present times would have much greater consequences than in the past. Humans have built up a significant civilization. Twenty thousand years ago, a two foot rise in sea levels would not have had drastic results. Today it would.

What I don't understand is the intensity with which people resist this. Let's accept that the evidence isn't conclusive for either argument. But as someone pointed out previously, isn't this one of those issues where it's wise to err on the safe side?

Even if global warming weren't an issue, isn't it inherently better to reduce pollution?

Ask the asbestos workers if, in the 1950's when someone suggested that the fibers might be dangerous, they don't wish more care had been taken then -- even before there was final proof.

In my Civ2 games there is no Kyoto treaty. The only lasting treaties seem to be the ones that the AI signs to control my "aggression".

[Julius Brenzaida]

I am pretty sure that Switzerland has signed and so far applied the Kyoto protocol.
If you want to see the effects of civ2 global warming and are the lucky posssessor of civ2 ToT, may I invit you to look at the Invasion Earth succession games. There was nuke and pollution everywhere and by dowloading the successive saved games you can see how it wrecks the land

[Julius Brenzaida]

Originally posted by La Fayette
Julius
Better fight smash than throwing insults .
What is your fight against smash? MP duel or what?

I don't throw no insults, not in english anyway
As the Gits pointed out, my fight with Smash is a chess game. It is a battle for the title of Apolyton world champion of chess. Very, very important.
You might want to defy the winner

[La Fayette]

Julius
1) Throwing insults: I wasn't referring to you at all (if you reread the top of the thread, you will notice that I had enough to refer to anyway ... alas!)
2) Chess: certainly not! My last game was probably 40 years ago.
I would get crushed after 3 moves .
3) smash is a gamer. I wish you the best of luck, since he won't give you any chance to win if he can avoid it

[debeest]

I think Campo's last post says things very well. The world is still waiting for the U.S. to sign the Kyoto treaty, rather than giving the U.S. yet another one-sided economic advantage. And why are so many people so firmly committed, in the face of considerable evidence, to the idea that global warming IS NOT an issue? How can those people then criticize others for committing to the idea that global warming IS an issue? I can only see either of those positions as being simplistically political rather than open-minded and scientific. That's why I initially asked, way back near the beginning of this thread, why Straybow dismissed global warming as "PC" -- as if there weren't both a left-wing and a right-wing "PC", as well as reasons to fear global warming and reasons to doubt it.