Natural Disaster is Nonsense

Actually, disaster losses happen because we do not prepare for natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, floods, etc.  We are vulnerable.  If we prepare our houses for wind or shaking then you will be more like Chile after a huge earthquake, and not Haiti, where nothing was done to prepare its structures or society for a big earthquake.

In other words,  so-called “natural disasters,” as if nature caused the disaster, don’t exist–the term is nonsensical.  It is the human race and its failed policies that cause the losses.

Sorry, Climate Change is Real

For those who think that climate change doesn’t exist or is some sort of natural process that recycles from century to century, you may not this summary.  Man is dumping CO2 into the air and it is accumulating at a rate never known to scientists test covering tens of thousand of years.  I you live in Florida you will face the consequences much sooner than you think, indeed you are already feeling the results of climate change.

“The amount of carbon dioxide humans are putting into the atmosphere is smaller but it’s not balanced, and so it builds up over time and it causes a sizable net gain,” Ruddiman explained.

“It may be 10 billion tons a year but much of it builds up year after year after year,” he said, and persists in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a chemical blanket.

Scientists who have used a variety of techniques to track earth’s changing climate over hundreds of thousands of years have found data that show carbon dioxide levels during that period never grew faster than 30 parts per million per 1,000 years. Yet the level has risen by that amount in just the last 17 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international organization widely regarded by the scientific community as a leading authority on the topic.

The result is the warmer temperatures and melting icecaps widely documented around the globe.

via Politifact slams climate science denier John Loughlin « Climate Progress.

The Very Basics of Climate Change: Best I’ve Seen

There lists the essential knowledge of scientists  about climate change.  Take the time to read this and you will see that this is not simple subject, but one that will impact our local community almost certainly South Florida, in the years ahead.

1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example.  We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of changes in the sun, which we also measure.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted range. Some observed changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case.Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, the mechanisms causing natural climate change like ice ages are irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.
5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by expert scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. It is also silly to think that a few minor errors in the extensive IPCC reports can invalidate the reports. The first thing that the world needs to do to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report at http://www.ipcc.ch is a good place to start.