1. I resent that skepticism is portrayed as tin-hat denial.
2. "If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future, said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. This is the defining moment."
Really? After billions of years of spinning around the sun, or let's just say hundreds of millions of years with a climate essentially like ours, with ice ages and hot times galore, we have two years or then we're dead? Gimme a break.
3. Related to 2 above, what makes the current climate configuration special? All the ice ages, all the hot times over millions of years, and suddenly when we get a small amount of data, we decide that the climate we find today is the standard from which we deviate at our peril?
Perhaps a more rational and practical view would be to recognize that climate does change significantly over time, and we should learn to adapt to that as individuals and nations. Because casually looking back over millions of years (casually is all I'm personally capable of, sorry), it seems that we're going to have to live with warming and cooling at some time (as we already have in the past), even if we turn off every light switch on Earth.
The problem is that the way we humans are living right now is NOT fit to adapt to significant changes in climate, and changing that would be even harder than curtailing our emissions. And it does not matter that there have historically been much greater differences in climate - we're living right now.
In the long run (centuries, millenia), yes, finding a way of living that can adapt to climate changes would be better. But that would require a significant smaller population density to have safety margins.
What is it about the way we live right now that's not fit to adapting? Is it population, as you mention in your last sentence? Not asking as a challenge, just clarification.
We probably just squeaked through the big ice, and I think low population was a disadvantage for species survival. I think we "adapted" through the recent little ice age pretty well, although it was probably not an align-the-governments scale challenge.
Yes, we are living right now. I think we'll make it through.
2. "If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future, said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. This is the defining moment."
Really? After billions of years of spinning around the sun, or let's just say hundreds of millions of years with a climate essentially like ours, with ice ages and hot times galore, we have two years or then we're dead? Gimme a break.
3. Related to 2 above, what makes the current climate configuration special? All the ice ages, all the hot times over millions of years, and suddenly when we get a small amount of data, we decide that the climate we find today is the standard from which we deviate at our peril?
Perhaps a more rational and practical view would be to recognize that climate does change significantly over time, and we should learn to adapt to that as individuals and nations. Because casually looking back over millions of years (casually is all I'm personally capable of, sorry), it seems that we're going to have to live with warming and cooling at some time (as we already have in the past), even if we turn off every light switch on Earth.