Hi Ned.
It is very nice to know that L18 reach a foot. What an incredible display specimen one that size would be! Provided they don't just suddenly turn all black or something. By the way the offending anemone decided to move itself today.
I am writing such a long response this time because you are a friend and exactly the kind of person who ought to know this stuff, since your business depends somewhat upon it.
I don't think there is anything wrong with being skeptical, that is good, just so long as you are also weighing the best available evidence. Also there is a big difference between a climate skeptic, and a climate denier. You do not want to be the latter right now, it is likely to be highly maladaptive.
The global climate change story is like your catfish. The proof is in. If you look at the actual data, it is about as convincing, no matter who you are or what your biases may be, that if you are truly considering things in a critical and skeptical manner, we have a problem here, a real one, and it is a problem that people can do something about but may choose not to. Remember that scientists do not ever consider a case totally closed, they just strive for about 95% certainty. And then they keep asking the same question over and over again just to make sure things haven't changed and to keep raising the level of certainty as much as possible. So we've been at this now for several decades. Yes, in the early 1970's, before supercomputers and tons of earth-monitoring data from satellites and a good understanding of the sun and farts and clouds and all the rest, back then there was some controversy over whether the earth was getting warmer or cooler. Robert Frost, even earlier, wrote a good poem about that controversy. But right now, our level of certainty is comparable to things like a hurricane big enough to destroy the levees is headed straight at you and is only a few hours away and here is a picture of it headed straight for you (information that unfortunately did not save New Orleans), and is getting near stuff like the earth goes around the sun.
Now is different than the early seventies. Ned, 95% is a hell of a lot more certainty than you'll get in the weather report, or from your doctor, or anything else at all in normal life. And actually, at this point, many of the indicators are definitive at a level of 99% or beyond. So the bottom line is, if you consider all the best data now available from all possible sources, the scientific community almost unanimously agrees (the fact that there are a handful of doubters is healthy, but not something to base your life that we are at least 95% confident of global climate change being a real phenomenon, that the current rate of change is toward an earth that is warmer on average, but hot in some places and unnaturally cool in others (overall warming, but strong regional patterns), that these changes will help a few people in a few places but on the whole cause pandemic economic collapse, suffering and death, and that a very large proportion of this change is being caused directly by people burning stuff: fossil fuel, forests, grasslands, and so forth.
The other problem with complete skepticism right now, is that if you interview the Inuit who live at and are experiencing the melting of the north polar ice cap, you might get some pretty strong opinions about whether global warming is real or not. Talk to the polar bears, if you will, by looking at how easy they're finding it to hunt or den over ice that is no longer there but has been for tens of thousands of years, maybe since polar bears even evolved. And what about the massive destruction of roads and infrastructure due to heaves in permafrost that hasn't seen this kind of defrosting in recorded history? Or talk to the folks in the US bread basket, that is now headed north into Canada. Or African farmers whose rampant crop failure and water shortages spell certain death for them and their families. Or the Maldive islanders whose homes are now washing away due to the thermal expansion of the oceans, already raising sea level just noticeably enough to matter to people living at sea level. Or the people who were stranded all through the Amazon Basin by a shortage of rainfall of trans-historic proportions. I can go on if you wish.
Of course reefs have bleached and recovered before. Bleaching appears to be an adaptation to warm spells. The corals may replace cool water symbionts for symbionts used to warmer water, or the reverse. However, bleaching has never produced the wholesale death across reefs around the world, multiple times each year, that we are seeing now. We know this because if you drill down through reefs and analyze who they have changed over time, there is nothing like what we are seeing now for at least the past several million years, anywhere. So in other words, the ability of most corals to adapt to warmer water has been outstripped by the rate at which long spells of very warm water have increased.
The cow farts are the same as buffalo farts. Methane is an important greenhouse gas. Termite farts put them both to shame. Farts have been taken into account in the models and they are not what has changed so much.
Mini ice ages have happend, lots of times the earth has gotten warmer then cooler, warmer then cooler. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW IS ABOVE AND BEYOND ALL CYCLICAL CHANGES. These past changes are very well understood. They were taken into account by the scientific community.
The sun is getting slightly hotter every year. This is already taken into account in the climate models. The warming we see now is ABOVE AND BEYOND anything that can be explained by the life history of the sun.
Solar flares are indicative of a more active sun. The sun's activity cycle (an 11-year cycle linked to sunspots) does slightly warm and cool the earth. This is taken into account in the models. What we are seeing is ABOVE AND BEYOND the normal cycle of solar activity.
It is true about the planes. Jet contrails reflect solar energy back into space, as do any kind of clouds. Clouds and cloud dynamics have been taken into account in the climate models. It has also been proposed that we increase cloud cover artificially in order to retard global warming. This would have catastrophic impacts on crop production and the growth and health of forests, reefs, you name it.
SO: The effect is not all man-made. Just most of it.
And here's what matters: Enough is caused by people that we have the option, if we elect it, to avert catastrophic suffering, widespread crop failure, starvation, and death from thirst and disease, a large amount of political turmoil and war secondary to the sudden reduction in resources, and generally a really stupid and unnecessary future. And by the way, the loss of most of our coral reef estate.
So here we are able to prevent all of that from happening. We know that this is what's in store for us with a higher level of certainty than we will have that an asteroid will hit us when that time comes. The only way we could avoid trying to move the asteroid aside would be to sit on our hands until the level of certainty creeps from 95% to 99.9999%, by which time it will be WAY too late to even try to do anything about it.
This is my field, Ned. I am only one scientist. But I do work on climate change effects on corals, and I have read a lot of what my colleagues have written, I know how the scientific consensus is formed, and I am persuaded that we have a real problem on our hands here that we'd better do something about.
If you look hard enough, you will succeed in finding a "second opinion" that might support doing nothing. And it is true that sometimes one scientist says something that is true against the grain of the entire rest of the scientific community. Generally, however, that happens in the event of a novel theory or discovery. I don't think it is too common in situations like this, where we are staring down a monster and anybody with open eyes can see, feel, and fear that monster. Remember, the press looks high and low for the one person who might disagree with everybody else, and then sets that person up as 50% of the opinion of the expert community. Makes good copy and television, but man, you would not want to bet your life on that one person, especially if he or she has a poor track record about being right in the past.
Windmills and solar panels are going to help quite a bit, but they alone will not supply enough energy to make all, or even most, of the difference. We have to live cleaner. Doing so is good for business...just not necessarily good for oil and coal companies, or, evidently, for Dick Cheney or George Bush. They don't like the idea of global warming. All the more reason to recognize and combat it, far as I'm concerned.
So, the problem is real, we can do something about it, it is the possibly the most serious challenge ever faced in human history...
And we should not do what?
Les Kaufman
Professor of Biology
Boston University Marine Program
and
Senior PI
Marine Management Area Science
Conservation International
“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
George W. Bush
Saginaw, Michigan; September 29, 2000
_________________
Ned
unclenedsfishfactory@gmail.com
508 533 5969
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