LA Fires Are Not Just A Tragedy - They're A Crime

[haricotblue]

NEVER FORGET: THEY KNEW

Excerpt:

What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime. THEY KNEW — and they let our planet burn for profit.

THEY KNEW in 1959, when famed physicist Edward Teller told a symposium of petroleum industry executives of the coming catastrophe:

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

THEY KNEW in 1968, when a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute concluded:

Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.

THEY KNEW in 1977 and 1978 when...

[WhiteTara]

1. and they still know and pump more oil from the earth.

[ancianita]

2. THEY are these companies. THEY are their CEO's, names that can be found in Wikipedia.

[ffr]

3. I feel really sad for children being born today. They'll inherit Hell on Earth.

I try to pound it into the heads of the next generation that things are going to get a lot worse.

Climate affects everything. And with that, the age of being lazy about the environment will be over.

They are so unprepared.

[GregGilman]

4. An ironic Carter/Reagan footnote

Carter (who put solar panels on the White House) laying in rest in DC while Reagan's hometown burns to the ground due to climate change (he removed those solar panels) is a deeply ironic footnote on a very sad day.

[LastDemocratInSC]

5. The warming effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere have been known for 200 years.

https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/

The time line below is from the footnotes of the NASA article.

"In 1824, Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder. He suggested something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket. In 1856, Eunice Foote discovered that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation.

In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. In 1941, Milutin Milankovic linked ice ages to Earth’s orbital characteristics. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956."

[TrollBuster9090]

6. It's Worse Than That. Teller Was A Physicist, So He Was Good at Calculating Temperature Changes...

...But, as a Biologist, that's not what keeps me awake at night. Changing the temperature of the planet by a degree or two will cause massive changes in climate patterns, droughts, floods, raising sea levels etc.

But that's NOTHING compared to what will happen if the ocean temperature change starts killing the photosynthetic algae that supplies the Earth with most of its oxygen. As bad as it is, we can LIVE with floods, droughts, and forest fires. We CAN'T live without oxygen.

1. Will the increase in ocean temperature kill the algae that live in coral reefs? Yes. It's already doing that now. (See 'bleaching' of the Great Barrier Reef.)

2. If the ocean heats up a couple of degrees, it may kill the algae at the equator. But won't that also make it possible for the algae to grow farther north and south to compensate? YES, but there isn't as much light there. So, you still end up getting less oxygen.

3. Can you fight the effects of global warming using 'GLOBAL DIMMING?' (This is a plan that's been around for awhile. You throw sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere to block out some of the solar radiation. This is essentially what happens when volcanos erupt, and throw a lot of sulfuric acid into the atmosphere.) YES! This will solve the problem of global warming, but it will make the loss of oxygen producing algae even worse.

4. Our best hope is that scientists can use genetic engineering to create algae that are more temperature resistant, and flood the oceans with them before we all suffocate. The bad news, of course, is that MAGA will probably have put all the scientists in jail by then, for perpetuating the 'green hoax.'

We're fucked.

Everybody remembers Heston's line from Soylent Green. SOILENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! Does anybody remember the line before that? Soylent Green was supposed to be made from algae. But the climate had changed so much that the algae and oceans were dying, so they had to make it out of people instead.

How about that? Soylent Green predicted the future, but we all missed the point by focusing on the wrong thing entirely. Pretty symbolic of the human race, isn't it?

[Ponietz]

7. If big oil companies are the dealers

We are all junkies and share that guilt to a lesser degree.

[Evolve Dammit]

8. Good historical account. When BP announced "Beyond Petroleum" I was briefly optimistic. Then Deep Horizon.. 23,000

(yeah 23,000) abandoned wells in Gulf of MEXICO. No monitoring of them that I know of. What the F could go wrong? And that is just one body of ocean in our "control" environmentally speaking. At least for another 11 days.....

[Jughead]

9. Zoning laws

Zoning laws didn’t help. Greed from another mother.

[hueymahl]

10. There is a lot of blame to go around

Local and state officials could have done a lot more to prevent this happening.

[Martin Eden]

11. Drill Baby Drill

That's the strategy of the UG govt for at least the next four years.

[LymphocyteLover]

12. will we ever change our ways enough to prevent the worst?