|
Go-vangelist
United States
Denver
Colorado
-
Just found this documentary by National Geographic. It's the best video I've found on the topic so far.
National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World
2007, 96 minutes
Netflix
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/National_Geographic_Six_De...
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Degrees-Could-Chan...
-
steven slater
England
County of Essex
-
tesuji wrote:
I don't belive in man made videos.
-
Neil Carr
United States
Barre
Vermont
-
I took a break from Fallout New Vegas and fired it up on the xbox this afternoon.
I think the strength of it was that it was able to go on location to a number of places that are undergoing dramatic changes right now and interviewing people in those locations about the changes that are being observed.
It isn't "boring" in any way... that is, it isn't filled with a lot of direct data, but instead presents a lot of cgi effects to show various ways in which climate change could impact locations. It is interviewing scientists in sexily lit sets, with lots of panning and montages. You don't get the traditional talking head expert presentation. Thus, it might hold the attention of some people better than a traditional approach, which ultimately is needed. Not everyone is going to sit through an episode of Charlie Rose as he interviews someone in depth in a quiet black studio.
-
Go-vangelist
United States
Denver
Colorado
-
Now I'm reading the book:
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, By Mark Lynas
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/14...
We're screwed.
If you want to know why warming will be catastrophic, read this book. And I'm only up to the "Two Degrees" chapter - four more degrees to go.
-
David desJardins
United States
Burlingame
California
-
tesuji wrote: We're screwed.
This is so much not news.
-
Go-vangelist
United States
Denver
Colorado
-
DaviddesJ wrote: tesuji wrote: We're screwed. This is so much not news.
It was news to me. Even though I've read several books on the subject, it wasn't really clear to me until I read this book.
Even the amount of CO2 emitted so far is enough to eventually melt Greenland and raise sea levels tens of feet, as well as cause major storms and droughts, and decimate much of life in the oceans and on land, among other things.
-
Marshall P.
United States
Wichita
Kansas
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky
There is grandeur in this view of life, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
-
tesuji wrote:
Even the amount of CO2 emitted so far is enough to eventually melt Greenland and raise sea levels tens of feet, as well as cause major storms and droughts, and decimate much of life in the oceans and on land, among other things.
uuuuhhh. I don't know.
I accept AGW as much as anyone on this forum. And I watched the documentary in the OP and thought it was quite good.
Still, melt Greenland? decimate much of life?
I'm skeptical.
-
David desJardins
United States
Burlingame
California
-
mdp4828 wrote: Still, melt Greenland? decimate much of life? I'm skeptical.
Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt. It's just a question of how long it takes. It is a lot of ice. It could be a thousand years. We really can't tell.
Decimate much of life? Lots of individual species will surely go extinct. Others will adapt. "Decimate" is rather subjective. How much do we care about mass extinctions? They have certainly happened before in the Earth's history.
-
John Taylor
United States
Gastonia
North Carolina
-
Does this documentary mention anything about solutions? Even without man-made factors, global meltdowns and ice ages happen quite regularly. We need to talk about something other than banning CO² emissions.
-
David desJardins
United States
Burlingame
California
-
JDTAY wrote: We need to talk about something other than banning CO² emissions.
Why?
-
John Taylor
United States
Gastonia
North Carolina
-
DaviddesJ wrote: JDTAY wrote: We need to talk about something other than banning CO² emissions. Why?
Did you even read my post? Ice ages are coming no matter what our level of CO² emissions is or has been. We need to look into geo-engineering.
-
Ben Foy
United States
Ellicott City
Maryland
-
JDTAY wrote: Does this documentary mention anything about solutions?
Both political parties have proposed solutions:
The Democrats regularly propose initiatives to reduce carbon emissions like the recent Telecomuting initiative for Federal Employees.
The Republicans tell their members to ignore ACW while cynically noting that a lot of their members live at higher altitudes. Their members are encouraged to buy gold and guns, just in case.
-
David desJardins
United States
Burlingame
California
-
JDTAY wrote: Did you even read my post? Ice ages are coming no matter what our level of CO² emissions is or has been.
I didn't understand your point, that's why I asked you to explain.
Natural climate change is much more gradual than the effects of what humans are doing. Obviously, if ice sheets rolled down to cover much of North America again, that would be something we would probably want to influence rather than just adapt to. But this is a longer-term problem and it seems reasonable to think that advances in technology would make it much more viable to deal with, if human civilization survives that long.
What we have right now is a short-term crisis of change that is going to happen very rapidly over decades rather than centuries, if we don't greatly reduce our emissions. More rapid change has many bad consequences. From the human point of view, the useful life of things like beachfront property is such that the economic loss from rapid change is immense. And from the environmental point of view, rapid change leads to a lot more extinctions because species can't adapt so rapidly.
-
|
|
