Another reason for a govt. shut down and the Closing of National Parks

8 Comments

1. MissOH says:

   13 April 2011 at 6:20 AM

   My son, who is fascinated in all things apocalyptic (regarding nature) and I were talking about this a while back. Kinda makes me glad we moved from Wyoming but as the link indicates, if this happens in our lifetime, living on one of the coasts will be preferable, but life as we know it will be very different.
2. albizzi says:

   13 April 2011 at 6:50 AM

   Global warming,: Yes, I acknowledge there was and there currently is one although it looks as it is much slowing since its peak in 1998.
   Global warming linked to carbon dioxide: No, because:
   – 1/ There were historically recorded higher temperatures (for example by the mid 15th century) while the CO2 level was much lower that it is today.
   – 2/ Analysts on a long term (hundreds of thousands years) could recently demonstrate that the temperature rises ((there were many) are preceding (not FOLLOWING) the CO2 level increases. In other terms one has confused the cause and the effect.

   Therefore, yes Yellowstone alarmism is urging.
3. APX says:

   13 April 2011 at 8:52 AM

   I remember watching something on the Discovery Channel about this last year. I live in the general area, although I’m closer to its neighbour, Glacier National Park in Montana. Either way, even here in Canada, being so close to Idaho and Montana, if that thing blows before I move within the next two weeks, I’m doomed.
4. Random Friar says:

   13 April 2011 at 10:10 AM

   I recall seeing a fictional film, a “what if” called “Supervolcano,” in the faux-documentary/action film blend. Standard disaster movie stuff, but yeah, if it goes, the US is pretty much toast.
5. APX says:

   13 April 2011 at 11:51 AM

   @ Random Friar
   I recall seeing a fictional film, a “what if” called “Supervolcano,” in the faux-documentary/action film blend.

   Yeah, it’s on YouTube. I’m tempted to watch it now, but I must stay focused and undistracted for the rest of the week. For those of you who do have time to kill, and are interested,

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF-RKzqNtz0&feature=PlayList&p=83F6492FA7EACDEA&index=0&playnext=1
6. Andrew Saucci says:

   13 April 2011 at 7:38 PM

   I knew that not paying the $25 to drive US 20 through there was a good idea, even if I didn’t know why at the time some years ago.
7. abiologistforlife says:

   13 April 2011 at 8:08 PM

   It would be very bad, but the chances of it happening on a relevant timescale are very low.

   The thing that makes global warming/climate change dangerous (and, yes, I do think the evidence that it is happening and at least partly human-caused is convincing… though the media has the tendency to focus on exactly the wrong aspects, the disasters that probably will not happen, and ignore the real risks) is not so much the warming in itself… it’s that it happening so *fast* causes other disruptions … sea level rises, ecological disruption, drought, weird climate changes (even though the global temperature rises, some places actually get colder – climate is far from straightforward).

   It probably won’t be obviously cataclysmic – while it well could cause a tremendous amount of suffering and death, but most probably in ways that no individual death can really be traced to ‘global warming’. Tropical diseases move north a bit, into areas not prepared for them … sea levels rise a bit, so hurricanes and other flooding are more disastrous than usual… heat waves (and cold snaps too, at least in temperate zones) hit harder, causing more deaths… that sort of thing. But anything really dramatic is unlikely, at least for decades.

   Of course, if the ‘clathrate gun’ people are right, we might be talking something on the Yellowstone scale, or worse. But that’s far from proven.
8. abiologistforlife says:

   13 April 2011 at 8:17 PM

   @albizzi: The mid 15th century was part of the “Little Ice Age”, so I severely doubt temperatures then were higher than today. The Medieval Warm Period (what is usually mentioned in this context) was several centuries earlier… more like 950-1250 … and it was anomalously warm in Europe/the North Atlantic – thus the Viking colonization of Greenland, etc. – but *global* temperatures seem actually to have been a bit lower than today’s.Evidence elsewhere is even sparser, so it’s hard to tell – but the unusual warmth seems to have been a regional phenomenon and not global. So the *global* temperature was probably not so far off what the CO2 level predicts.

   Also, CO2 is not the ONLY factor, and nobody says it is… but –all else being equal– higher Co2 leads to higher temperatures.

   I’m not sure about the preceding rather than following bit — do you have a source? — but ultimately, the idea of AGW isn’t derived from looking at history, but from an understanding of how the atmosphere interacts with solar radiation. In fact, it was discovered over 100 years ago by Svante Arrhenius, when fossil-fuel burning was tiny by modern standards.

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