Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown

[NickB79]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/28/climate-change-try-catastrophic-climate-breakdown/

Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.

Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.

In other words, it’s perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.

There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: “It’s as bad as we thought it was.”

Yep.

[gtar100]

1. I asked a conservative friend the other day what would be the motivation of environmentalists

and scientists to say such things about global warming and other issues involving protecting the environment and and all he could come up with is that they were stubborn and want to be in control and that they are "against business". We talked about grant money but I told him that the very basis of science is determining what the truth is, to uncover facts. If that led to the discovery that global warming wasn't real, that would be what they would say. But they aren't saying that and they are raising the hard questions we have to deal with if we want to maintain our way of life.

I think we need to make it clear that those of us who consider ourselves to be environmentalists or at least care enough about the environment to make changes that we do in fact care very much about having a vibrant economy and that if the long term sustainability of our environment isn't considered as primary importance, then there isn't going to be any sort of economy to speak of whatsoever. This "anti-business" meme is bullshit. What the concern is about is wasteful, non-sustainable business practices that hurt people, pollute our natural resources, and destroy the very environment that we live in. All of us want our businesses to succeed because that is how we sustain our own lives. So let's figure out a way to do it that doesn't make us sick in the process. That's what we're asking for.