By the time the problem becomes obvious to everyone — and the first example which comes to mind is someone coming home only to discover their home completely engulfed in flame — there isn't much anyone can do.
Now..I have just told you a story, and you don't believe it. Of course you don't. People want and need to believe that someone is in charge and in control of the situation. Human nature.
But how many people live in California (just as an example)? And you KNOW that the San Andreas fault is going to cut loose eventually but you stay there. Do you know that when it does your homeowner's insurance won't cover the damage? Oh, no it won't. Call your agent right now and ask. And do you know that FEMA doesn't have the money to help you with that? I'll bet you did know but don't believe it could happen to you.
A really simple scenario might involve a moderate earthquake which cut the water supply to Southern California. How would you deal with that? Or maybe that's the wrong question. Have you ever considered "what if"?
So we could deal with any ONE problem — too much phosphorus in fertilizer, too much this, too little that — but mankind cannot deal with what will happen when it all comes together because we cannot imagine it happening.
It's out there for us to embrace.
Article comments
1 - Phill Waters
I sometimes wonder who really is telling the truth on the global warming issue with so much scientific evidence on one side and then so much on the other to refute it. Maybe we should just put it to a vote on who believes and who doesn't and then take it from there.
2 - Arafat Hossain Piyada
People always tell Global warming is related to tree and ask everyone for greening. However, they always exclude other cause, simply because average people care less about it. Not many people know about Methane. They all know using chemical element is bad for environment but an average person never understand how bad that is. An average person never know how they can save energy and why really they need to save it! That's where government plays a big role. They have to guide people towards the knowledge from where people can be little more sensible and understand what they going to leave for their future generation in this planet.
3 - FCEtier
"You don't have to believe in global warming to be a good steward of the earth." -- Miriam Goldberg
My favorite quote on this subject.
4 - JohnW
We've been hearing overpopulation doom predictions for centuries, it won't happen and I'll tell you why. Technology. Man will advance technology to adapt to any and all problems that face us. More and and more people will merely drive us to spread out from this planet, taking entire ecosystems with us. When this planet does finally come to an end, it'll be a sad day to our decedents but not THE END, and many species will have US to thank for saving them.
5 - Dr Dreadful
What a bizarre article. It's certainly apt to remind us that anthropogenic global warming is only one of the many ecological holes we've dug for ourselves. So kudos for that.
But you can't argue that the variables are too complex to make accurate predictions about climate and in the next breath predict, with apparently total confidence, that the "Atlantic Conveyor" (it's a global conveyor, BTW, of which the Atlantic currents are just a part) will shut down in 2034.
In any case, the timeframe, should it happen, is on the order of decades rather than days. (It's probably time you returned that movie to Blockbuster.) And the latest research actually shows that the North Atlantic Current shows no sign of slowing down.
6 - Earl_E
The Atlantic doesn't appear to be slowing down, but the iceburgs in the Southern Ocean are going to change things regionally for sure.
A Pine Island Glacier collapse would portend near immediate flooding world-wide.
And if this geomagnetic increase over the last 2 weeks just reported today is any indication, we may have a sunspot peaking during an El Nino summer.
Fire and hurricanes. Love it!
7 - Dr Dreadful
Fire and hurricanes. Love it!
The Soufrière Hills volcano on Montserrat is erupting pyroclastic flows at the moment. Go there and you'll be able to enjoy both at the same time! :-)
8 - anonymous
Interesting point on thermodynamics. The answer is that we are using the potential energy of supernovas and stellar reactors for our level of chemical reactions.
Assuming we get off planet, we can make these reactions work until the universe disintegrates. At which point, there will be a slew of bad movies...
9 - Tom Burnett
@Dreadful: You are becoming a favorite critic of mine. I live on the side of an active volcano (Kilauea) and adjacent to several others. In addition, the Big Island of Hawaii is the tsunami capital of the world and we have daily earthquakes. Follow us at the above link.
I chose this locale. Montserrat is a bit boring for my taste.
10 - Tom Burnett
@John W: You have mentioned the one potential saving grace for humanity. My OPINION, which I do not care to defend, is that we are over the cliff and simply have not hit bottom yet. Others have completely opposite opinions...but none of us can predict the future. Wars, rumors of wars, impactors, volcanoes, pandemics; even things of which we know nothing can be out there. We have no way of knowing.
I will opine that the solutions we find will not address the problems which will arise. We are not as smart as nature.
11 - Tom Burnett
@ Earl_E: Floating ice melts do not, of course, increase the sea level. The ice is already floating and has displaced it's mass.
Glacier floes from land massed into the ocean, however, can produce increased sea levels. My feeling is that those changes are insignificant in comparison to the methane clathrates the actic warming is releasing.
Still, the effect is cumulative. A top starts so bob and weave as it loses energy but it still crosses it's normal spin pattern regularly. At that point it is impossible to tell whether the top is becoming more or less stable. Only when it falls over is the result obvious. An irreversible.
12 - Tom Burnett
We now see an interesting phenomenon. The volcano in Iceland may subside or it may spew enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to actually cause global cooling. That will merely create a situation in which huge increases of atmospheric CO2 will be generated.
And then, one day very soon, the dust will settle and the polar ice will melt within a few years, not a few eons and the methane released from the ice will replace oxygen...and we will become Venus.
13 - Tom Burnett
@Martina: CO2 is a precursor. It is interesting to note that despite all of the 'carbon footprint' rhetoric, CO2 emissions are increasing, not decreasing. Still, CO2 will do nothing more than melt the polar icecaps and the permafrost and the near-arctic oceans. That will allow the rapid release of all the methane that has been stored in ice for millennia. And methane is the trigger for the Venus effect.
I disagree with a previous poster as regards the Atlantic Conveyor. I agree that it shows no signs of slowing down; but it won't slow down over a period of time so that is what I expect to observe. It will reach a point, somewhere in the system, which will simply not be able to convey the current and the entire process will stop within hours or days.
A bad example is two or three damaged heat tiles on a space shuttle. It doesn't slow down; it suffers catastrophic destruction in seconds. Full speed to non-existent.
My point is that large-scale CO2 emissions have pushed us over the cliff. Nothing we can do could possibly stop it. The next level will be the wholesale release of methane but it will not affect us over hundreds or thousands of years. One large release will be sudden, dramatic, and fatal because it will generate other large releases in a rolling cataclysmal event.
That is if nothing else happens. If ONE iron earth-crosser 30 km in diameter impacts at any time in the future or one super-volcano erupts, the extinction event will be immediate.
We have had about six near misses during the last year. None were detected more than 48 hours from pass (or impact) and most only 24. There is nothing we can do about that sort of event. Period. Rocky ice-balls which explode in the atmosphere (Tunguska) are a different sort of animal. A moderately sized chunk of iron impacting at 90 degrees or nearly so anywhere on earth will be a problem.
14 - Tom Burnett
I suppose it would be appropriate to try and demonstrate my point again. This site is not strictly scientific, but it is very interesting nonetheless.
worldometers
Scroll down to 'Environment' and then look at the current average temperature. Better yet, look closely at every heading and subtitle on the page, but particularly Environment and Water.
I am willing to stipulate large errors in the numbers, but not by orders of magnitude. This is what is happening, now, today. We cannot stop it because we cannot limit our own population growth. Nature will have to do that for us.
The problem is that we are creating a perfect storm. Eventually the population will push food, water, energy, natural resources; both renewable and not; the land, the oceans and the atmosphere into a domino effect of failure.
We will not solve these problems because we cannot stop causing them.
15 - Robby Keller
Anybody who thinks global warming is false is misinformed. The ice in Antartica is melting fast. The animals there have a hard to finding food because of this. Antartica has been losing about 24 cubic miles every year.
16 - Dr Dreadful
A bad example is two or three damaged heat tiles on a space shuttle. It doesn't slow down; it suffers catastrophic destruction in seconds. Full speed to non-existent.
Indeed, an atrocious example, for reasons which I hope would be obvious.
Like you said - orders of magnitude.
17 - Marc Donovan
Everyone has their pet theory on global warming, and there is evidence on both sides, but the money is going into the warming side. So even if the warming scientists see evidence of cooling they ignore the man behind the curtain because of a paycheck.
18 - chrome
Well, whatever it is we should prepare our selves what can happen and what would be our future if we will not participate and do the proper waste management and everything that concern on our environment.
19 - Tom Burnett
It's difficult for anyone to do anything. Buying a Prius simply shifts a person's guilt upstream...in effect, selling it back to Toyota, because you can never save as much extra energy or fuel as it took to build the car. That premium you paid is just 'guilt tax' and those batteries will go bad eventually and simply compound the existing problem.
In addition. more and more people are moving BACK to metropolitan areas for the few jobs that are still available. That complicates things even more.
I would love everyone to read the April 2010 edition of Scientific American; the article: Boundaries for a healthy planet'.
But the only way, to REALLY prepare is to live in a place where you can be completely self-sufficient and there are not many of those. You have to collect water and not depend on aquifers or public water or water external sources of water for agriculture. If you want meat or fish, you may have to hunt, kill, butcher and preserve it. You have to have your own sewage system and solar/wind/generator power and expect them to all fail periodically. You have to live in an area which will grow good year-round and doesn't require heating or air conditioning. And you have to be comfortable with the possibility the economy can collapse.
Almost no one in America can do that or, if they could, would want to. I am one of the ones who wants to; not as a survival strategy....but to see how difficult it is. I'm almost there, minus the off-grid power. I'm having fun, but I am retired.
20 - anonymous
john w exactly ......... technology will solve our problems , in spite of the government attempts to ration that technology as they see fit.