Global Warming

Jesus is watching out for us.

Either that, or he's coming back during the apocalypse.

Somebody better be watching out for us; the fucking Congress sure as hell isn't.

If the oceans rise even one more foot, I'm going to go kidnap my daughter and get her out of Brooklyn. It got too close for comfort last year.

Well, the US isn't the only nation on Earth. China isn't bloody likely to cut back on coal burning, not while they're only the second-largest economy on the planet. The US Congress could shut down the US economy and GW would still continue for a thousand years -- due to China, and the momentum of the changing albedo.

Just sayin'.

Well, of course you're right. We have reached a point where things will continue to get worse no matter what we do at this point. But we can, I believe (or at least I hope), take steps that will make a correction over the long term. Just because what we do may not help this generation or the next, it would be nice if we managed to not drive ourselves into extinction. (Of course, we all go extinct one at a time, anyway.)

The really despicable part of the actions [not] being taken, is the position espoused by so many of the assholes claiming that everything is just fine. Mankind has had nothing to do with the problem of climate change (or air pollution, or undrinkable water, or land that can no longer produce crops, etc.).

And just to piss of anyone browsing around: I blame all of the problems on economics (pronounced capitalism).

Stephen Colbert had a great line in his show last night.

He said the Republican party has taken their slogan from the war on drugs in the 1980s -- "Just Say No" -- and turned it into their party platform on everything.

Yeah, I caught that. I'm really unhappy that Colbert is leaving that show.

He might, and probably will be, less constrained on The Late Show when he is freed of that rather stupid character he plays that has long outlived its funniness.

Global Warming can't be real.  It snowed last night, about a foot, and it's 21° out.

It's projected to get down to 16º tomorrow night.  If it does, that will mean in 2021 Seattle had temperature extremes 100° apart.  That's about twice normal.

Meteorologists now predict Earth will reach that magic +1.5°C temperature rise by 2027. Nothing we do now can stop it.

That temp is the one where the Greenland ice sheet melts, Antarctica loses its ice, Earth's albedo changes, water levels rise by 23 feet, and without the ameliorating effect of the last remnants of the last Ice Age, there will be no governor on the Earth's average temperature.  Once the last ice is gone, temperatures will soar. The Earth will have finally left the current Ice Age and enter into another sweltering Oven Age.

Will it return to an Ice Age after man is gone?  Not immediately.  Our greenhouse gases will continue to boost the temps  for tens of millions of years, until new species of vegetation take over the planet, sucking up carbon dioxide and outgassing oxygen.  Once super-oxygenated, the temperatures will again start to modulate.

It'll take a couple hundred million years.

And you'll be able to tell your great grandkids it started in your lifetime.

USGS wrote:

During the last ice age glaciers covered almost one-third of Earth's land mass, with the result being that the oceans were about 400 feet (122 meters) lower than today. During the last global "warm spell," about 125,000 years ago, the seas were about 18 feet (5.5. meters) higher than they are now.

400 feet just happens to be about the current depth of the continental shelves.  Coincidence?