Denial is more than a river in Egypt...it may be creating the river in Egypt

I've been worried that this might happen ever since World Jump Day. The inhabitants obviously jumped a little too hard, and now their island is under water.

I noticed a couple of things about the referenced article. Most significantly, this "news" story doesn't say a word about when Lohachara "sank". (What happened to the "Who, What, When, Where & How" philosophy of news reporting?)

The article also fails to mention how high above sea level the island was. There's probably a good reason for that. If the island was a mere one foot above high tide, and the sea was rising at 1/2 inch per year (it's actually far less than that) even a moron could conclude that it would take twenty four fricking years for the "island" to "sink."

To its credit, the story does mention that Lohachara was situated near the mouths of two rivers, but fails to credit erosion with any part of its disappearance. Instead we see statements like the story's lead:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.

Or this one in bold near the bottom of the story:

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

This is exactly the kind of factually anemic alarmist propaganda that makes me glad that at least some people are skeptical about the causes (and cures) of climate change.

Somebody's trying to pull the wool over our eyes big-time here folks. And from the looks of things, they're succeeding.

Gee, imagine that. Bob is a skeptic.

Yeah...whodathunkit???

Did Mr. Gore stop using his private jet yet?

Here's a prediction I'm not skeptical about at all. Really.

Climate scientists predict 14 degree temperature increase--Tomorrow!

First of all, fistandantalus, I doubt very seriously that Al Gore even owns a private jet to stop using. So that's a red herring if I ever read one. Nor do I suspect that he has stopped driving a gasoline or diesel burning car, nor has he stopped heating his house, probably with natural gas, or leaving the lights on, with power probably supplied by burning coal. He probably even reads books printed on paper made from trees. So what? Can we discuss the issue or do you want to continue to play games?

Judging by Fistandantalus' question, my guess is that we're dealing with a mind long since closed to any new information. Why waste time, breath (figurative), and energy on someone apparently disinclined to open their mind?

I don't think there's much doubt that "we're dealing with a mind long since closed to any new information." (If the shoe fits...)

Bob, you've been hanging around these parts long enough to know full well that while I have some very strong opinions, I do not pretend to have all the answers. I realize that the issue of global warming is being debated by people on both sides, but I simply cannot understand how seemingly intelligent and well-meaning people can ignore the overwhelming evidence currently available.

And no, the shoe does not fit.

To me the issue is simple arrogance. The doubters, like Bob, are willing to bet the future of human civilization that they are right and that the accumulate scientific evidence is wrong.

Although I do believe global warming is a reality, I have to agree with Bob that there are some flaws in the way that article was written. The article raises up more questions than it answers.

Wow, Dennis and I agree on something! As Adam once remarked in a similar situation, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

We'll, we kind of agree... I think it's arrogant to assume that humankind understands enough about the complexities of global climate to actually man-handle mother nature.

Literally, the largest variable in predicting climate is the sun. The trouble is, we haven't been collecting data about the sun long enough to recognize cycles that may well span centuries instead of decades. When they are included in long term climate models, data about the sun are educated guesswork at best.

Facts exist separately from science. A consensus of scientists can not create facts, they can only recognize them and describe them. It's a fact that on average, global temperature is rising. Science has recognized that situation. That doesn't mean they fully understand the causes of it--they admit that. Beyond that, any arrogant notions of our ability to accurately control global climate are purely theoretical. Yet so many Environmental Evangelists religiously believe that disaster is on the horizon, and the only thing we can do to save it is reduce CO2 and other "greenhouse" gas emissions using brain farts like Kyoto that purpose to create a global economic commodity out of thin air.

It's an emotional, faith based belief.

Just 30 years ago, a consensus of scientists warned us of impending doom due to global cooling, (and that it was all our fault!) They were wrong on both counts.

Even if it could be proven that mankind is a significant cause of global warming, there's no guarantee that undoing that damage would be as simple as reducing greenhouse gasses. It's a compound theory. Not a fact.

Bottom line: "It's not nice to fool mother nature" (Especially when you don't know what your doing.)

I think it's arrogant to assume that humankind understands enough about the complexities of global climate to actually man-handle mother nature.

It's also arrogant to assume that we know enough about how gravity works to man-handle it. We don't know where it came from, why it works, or whether or not it is constant. And yet, we launch things into space. We don't know how electrons work or where they came from, hell, we don't even know how they move or why they stand still. And yet, here I sit, using a laptop composed of atoms, powered by electricity, and it doesn't fall apart. Shocking.

What are the consequences if I'm wrong? We have wasted money? Created new technology and made our air cleaner and our people healthier? What are the consequences if you are wrong?

Literally, the largest variable in predicting climate is the sun. The trouble is, we haven’t been collecting data about the sun long enough to recognize cycles that may well span centuries instead of decades. When they are included in long term climate models, data about the sun are educated guesswork at best.

Even if the variations in sun irradiance span centuries, it's hard to look at graphs such as this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

And tell me that we're looking at the top part of a cycle that we have failed to observe in the preceding 2000 years.

Moreover, it is scientific fact that more carbon dioxide in an atmosphere raises surface temperatures. We need only look at Venus to demonstrate the difference between warming caused by solar irradiance and warming caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Venus is almost twice as far from the sun as Mercury and gets only 1/4 the solar energy at the surface. And yet, the surface temperature on Venus is higher than the highest temperatures on Mercury. Why? The atmosphere of Venus is over 95% carbon dioxide.

In addition, even the scientists who find that solar variation is underestimated as a cause of climate change find that "The best estimate of the warming from solar forcing is estimated to be 16% or 36% of greenhouse warming depending on the solar reconstruction. (Source: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/StottEtAl.pdf)

Yet so many Environmental Evangelists religiously believe that disaster is on the horizon, and the only thing we can do to save it is reduce CO2 and other “greenhouse” gas emissions using brain farts like Kyoto that purpose to create a global economic commodity out of thin air.

Yes, some people believe that disaster is on the horizon. Some people believe that disaster is looming in the next hundred years or so. What they agree on is that if we are right, and if we can do anything to stop it, now is the time to start. Will the "disaster" manifest itself overnight? No. Will symptoms of the coming plague show up before it's too late? Certainly. Melting ice. Disappearing ecosystems. Endangered species. More powerful storms. More rapidly rising sea levels.

When does the evidence get good enough? How many symptoms should we ignore before we start talking about solutions? Skipping that part of the debate because we would rather argue about whether or not it is our fault seems rather, um, arrogant.

Next, if all the evidence we have so far indicates a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases and global temperature, and if virtually the only possible explanation for the recent spike in atmospheric CO2 is human-caused, why is it inherently wrong to work from the assumption that our lowering of emissions can have an opposite effect? Whether or not Kyoto is a good start, I don't know, and I don't really care. What I do care about is that there are people looking for solutions, and I wish people wouldn't dismiss them because they refuse to see the problem.

And for what it's worth, we have created a global economic commodity out of thin air before: credit, debt markets, and electronic money.

It's an emotional, faith based belief.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg

If the blue line in this graph were the numbers of steps you took in a day, and the orange/red line were your bank account balance, and the sample size was over 400,000 years, wouldn't you start taking more steps every day?

Just 30 years ago, a consensus of scientists warned us of impending doom due to global cooling, (and that it was all our fault!) They were wrong on both counts.

This is not true. 30 years ago, the mainstream media latched on to a recent better scientific understanding of climate change and ice ages, and spawned public fears that global cooling would doom us all. These fears spread easily in the public, but was never supported by "a consensus of scientists." There is analysis here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/

Even if it could be proven that mankind is a significant cause of global warming, there’s no guarantee that undoing that damage would be as simple as reducing greenhouse gases. It’s a compound theory. Not a fact.

While I believe that it has already been proven as well as we are able, I must ask once again, what's the harm in trying? At the worst, we develop new, cleaner technology that creates jobs and tangentially creates untold benefits, while spending billions, only to find out that our original motivations were wrong. Worked out alright for Columbus and NASA.

"Just 30 years ago, a consensus of scientists warned us of impending doom due to global cooling, (and that it was all our fault!) They were wrong on both counts."

Actually, global warming could trigger an ice age. So global warming and global cooling are connected. That's the layman's short summary anyway. A scientist could explain it more technically than I can.

It’s also arrogant to assume that we know enough about how gravity works to man-handle it. We don’t know where it came from, why it works, or whether or not it is constant. And yet, we launch things into space.

You are correct that mankind doesn't fully understand gravity. However, we have been clever enough to observe that (unlike climate) gravity is relatively constant, and is predictable with incredible accuracy and repeatability. If you drop a can of beans on your toes, it hurts. Every time. The only variables involved are the mass of the can, its height above your toes and how loud you scream when impact inevitably occurs. The amplitude of the scream is usually directly proportional to the velocity of the can at the time of impact, which can be reliably determined with the aid of a pocket calculator. The number of variables involved with global climate is not known, but the ones that are known (or guessed) keep some of the worlds most powerful supercomputers busy for days.

When we "launch things into space" we are not man-handling gravity, we're demonstrating how well we understand it. (Man-handling gravity would probably involve the discovery or creation of matter with negative mass, and we're not that clever yet.) Satellites aren't casually tossed into space, we carefully calculate the trajectory and velocity required to place them in a stable orbit which is then maintained by gravity. These calculations are far more complex than the beans-on-toe example, but fortunately we have computers to help us implement our understanding of gravity.

We don’t know how electrons work or where they came from, hell, we don’t even know how they move or why they stand still. And yet, here I sit, using a laptop composed of atoms, powered by electricity, and it doesn’t fall apart. Shocking.

It's not at all shocking that your laptop doesn't fall apart. Atoms tend to stick together, and we know enough about them to split them. We know enough about electrons to generate them at power plants and distribute them through a complex power grid. We know enough about electronics that the laptops we casually toss into our backpacks are more powerful than the room sized computers that helped guide Apollo missions to the moon.

I conclude that mankind's understanding of gravity, electricity, and the atom is far greater than its current understanding of global climate, and suggest that the latter has been overstated and oversimplified.

What are the consequences if I’m wrong? We have wasted money? Created new technology and made our air cleaner and our people healthier? What are the consequences if you are wrong?

Wrong? I'm skeptical of some of the theories and solutions related to global warming and particularly our ability to accurately control climate. I'm annoyed that the popular media simplifies the issues. This does not mean I deny the existence of global warming or that it is a problem. We're already creating cleaner, more energy efficient technology, and this will continue regardless of whether "solutions" like the Kyoto Protocol are implemented. I've long thought that we could and should re-embrace nuclear power generation to reduce our dependance on carbon based sources.

Yes, some people believe that disaster is on the horizon. Some people believe that disaster is looming in the next hundred years or so. What they agree on is that if we are right, and if we can do anything to stop it, now is the time to start. Will the “disaster” manifest itself overnight? No. Will symptoms of the coming plague show up before it’s too late? Certainly. Melting ice. Disappearing ecosystems. Endangered species. More powerful storms. More rapidly rising sea levels.

Stop it Adam, you're scaring me! Yes, all those fearful things would be a real drag. And the scariest part is that we can't stop it. It's not a question of if bad things will happen, it's a question of when. Adaptation is a proven solution. Global climate control is an unproven theory.

Whether or not Kyoto is a good start, I don’t know, and I don’t really care. What I do care about is that there are people looking for solutions, and I wish people wouldn’t dismiss them because they refuse to see the problem.
And for what it’s worth, we have created a global economic commodity out of thin air before: credit, debt markets, and electronic money.

I can exchange my electronic money for real goods and services. Things like bonds and debt markets are real in terms of future value of the items traded. Emissions trading on the scale of those proposed in Kyoto Protocol have never been implemented world wide. Enforcement and the possibility of corruption (ala UN Oil for Food rip off) are unsolved problems. I readily admit that SO2 emissions trading was successfully implemented in the US, and I know the EU is already trading CO2. But people should know more about Kyoto before they support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

Please understand that I don't have a problem with reducing co2 emissions. I'm encouraged to see that some US companies are voluntarily engaging in emissions trading. But even if man-made co2 emissions are reduced to 1990 levels, the more optimistic projections predict only a slowing of global warming. I don't know of any studies that say we can stop it. And again, I stress that our ability to manipulate climate is still a topic of scientific discussion, as is the accuracy of long term climate projections.

Consider this... Through whatever means, lets say we reduce man-made co2 (what the heck, methane too) to 50% of what they are today, per capita, worldwide. Man, that would be great, right? But, in about 35 years when the when population is projected to double, we're right back where we started.

Maybe someday, we'll understand global climate to the extent necessary to control sea level, precipitation, clouds, and hurricanes. I just don't think we're there yet and I maintain that it is arrogant to assume that we are. We are a clever species, and I fully expect us to continue to develop cleaner and more efficient technology. For example, while writing this I thought of an invention that could significantly reduce methane emissions that result from bovine flatulence. While there's less methane than CO2 in the atmosphere, it is understood that methane has a far greater greenhouse impact. My idea is quite simple. It's a cylindrical catalytic converter that is inserted into the cow's... (Hey Adam, do you do patent law?)