There’s more information available here than the average True Believer will countenance. Here’s just a taste:
Abrupt climate change is a potential menace that hasn’t received much attention. That’s about to change. The U.S. Department of Energy recently launched IMPACTS – Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions – a program led by William Collins of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division that brings together six national laboratories to attack the problem of abrupt climate change…
Sparked by the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the reality of global warming finally got through to the majority of the world’s population. Most people think of climate change as something that occurs only gradually, however, with average temperature changing two or three degrees Celsius over a century or more; this is the rate at which ‘forcing’ mechanisms operate, such as the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels or widespread changes in land use.
But climate change has occurred with frightening rapidity in the past and will almost certainly do so again. Perhaps the most famous example is the reverse hiccup in a warming trend that began 15,000 years ago and eventually ended the last ice age. Roughly 2,000 years after it started, the warming trend suddenly reversed, and temperatures fell back to near-glacial conditions; Earth stayed cold for over a thousand years, a period called the Younger Dryas (named for an alpine wildflower). Then warming resumed so abruptly that global temperatures shot up 10 °C in just 10 years.
Because civilizations hadn’t yet emerged, complex human societies escaped this particular roller-coaster ride. Nevertheless, some form of abrupt climate change is highly likely in the future, with wide-ranging economic and social effects.
RTFA – and the linked materials, as well. Truly interesting.
I feel I should bring to some of your attention the fact that, irrespective of facts or evidence, people can just as easily be turned for or against an issue by the seeming informedness or ignorance of those who support either side of it. It is important when defending your position on an issue not to lose your audience on the basis of their not liking you.
I mention this because a few key posters, “J” in particular, have consistently presented their positions in a boorish and obviously incompetent manner, which again, all facts and evidence aside, could very easily turn anyone following this discussion against their position simply out of contempt for their blatant lack of ability to argue without resorting to straw men, personal attacks, and other forms of sophistry. When one has to defend one’s position by attacking the (presumed) educational or career backgrounds of one’s opponents, that position becomes far more tenuous in the eyes of anybody with the sense to see through such tactics.
So I would urge you all for your own sakes to choose your words far more carefully, and to keep the debate confined to facts, without these constant and pointless deviations into the realms of partisan politics and unsubstantiated assumptions about other posters’ personal lives. It would certainly make for more informative and less tiresome reading.
# 63 Malleus
It seems to me that you are under the impression that a blog is a forum for serious debate. It is not. It is a place where people commonly use ad hominem attacks and maunder over a topic to establish their dominance. From your post it is obvious you are unacquainted with this common “comment section” behavior. I will also point out that while trying to make some kind of fallacious argument you resort to exactly the type of conduct you so eloquently accuse others of partaking in. That is defined as hypocrisy. You in your own way are just a demeaning and dismissive of the posters here as I am. So, don’t you for a minute think that because you go about it in a calm and enshrouded way that you are some how above it. You are not. At least I am honest about how I feel instead of masking it behind some kind of spurious diatribe.