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PostPosted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 12:17 pm 
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Someone sent me this link today.

http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/ ... ypassSSO=1

Over the past half century, the powerful new science of climate and climate change has come into being. Research during that period has settled a fundamental climate question that had challenged scientists since the 19th century: Will human beings, by adding carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, significantly affect climate? The answer, debated for decades, is now known to be yes. Scientists now understand clearly that humankind is no longer a passive spectator at the great pageant of climate change. They have established that the climate is indeed warming and that human activities are the main cause.1 Every year brings thousands more research papers containing new knowledge of the many aspects of climate change.

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 09, 2011 2:11 pm 
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"It is urgent that climate scientists improve the ways they convey their findings to a poorly informed and often indifferent public."
It is really difficult to teach some of the real dummies we see, or get through the stubborn heads of the denialists like that snow guy.
The people tend to be like sheep. Naked monkeys that drive cars, and care less about long term events. If there is to be adequate and timely HGHG reductions, we won't be able to reason with or teach most quick enough. It will take strong governmental regulation, but we know that is not the way politicians get elected.
All we can do is keep on trying to get the changes. Keep on trying to educate the public and government. By the time they really see the negative impacts that they can directly associate to AGW, and begin real emissions reduction, momentum will carry it through to thermal maximum. :-#
"By Peter Goodchild

30 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org

A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that curve. Then one can look at the chapter on electricity, which as Richard Duncan says will be the first really distinct, “on-off” type of indicator. The next parallel can be found in the chapter on economics, which mentions two "phases," divided by the point at which money as such is no longer an important means of exchange; past examples occurred with the crash of the USSR, and in Weimar Germany.

In the chapter on famine, the fall of population appears as a parallel to the fall in fossil fuels. Some critics have said that the two do not necessarily go together -- or, rather, “fall” together. But they do, for a very simple mathematical reason. Fossil fuels are the source of more than 90 percent of the energy -- in the strict "physics" sense of the word -- in modern industrial society. If we take away 90 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 90 percent of the population. (If we take away 100 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 100 percent of the population.) No, we cannot replace that 90 percent with some "alternative" form of energy, as is explained in chapter one, because there isn't enough of any “alternative” to make much difference.

The same first chapter also illustrates why a voluntary reduction in population cannot work. (For that matter, neither would a mandatory reduction in population, and for the same reason.) Again, it's simple arithmetic. Oil production will fall, over the next few decades, by about 3 percent annually, and if instead we say 2 percent or 4 percent the final result isn't much different. But even if every woman on earth stopped having children from this day forward, there would still not be a 3 or 2 or 4 percent annual reduction in population.

It can be seen, therefore, that the curve of estimated past and future global oil production is not merely one of a myriad of problems with which mankind will have to deal. It is the time scale with which most other problems can be measured, and it is the cause of most other problems.

But if anyone really needs a magic number, a good choice would be 2030. That's the date at which, with a 3 percent annual decline in oil production, the year's production will be half of that in the peak year. And half of peak oil means half of everything else in human society. A very important “half” will be population, because the other half will have died of famine. And that's the one item that very few people can mentally assimilate."

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