We are screwn.

Except mine went "We're fucked. We're all fucked. We had better start growing some kick-ass scientists and physicists to try and get us out of this mess because we're all fucked. It's too late.... "

Because a lot of our problems are far more political than they are technical..

The technical problems are going to be the easy things to fix, it's the political and economic problems that are going to prove to be truly intractable..

Things are fairly simple, people are fiendishly complex..

Equatorial areas are already getting hit heavily.

But I'd say the biggest worry is changes to the weather patterns. And I say this living in Colorado, where we just had a huge heat wave, that contributed to not one, but TWO of the most destructive wildfires in state history, which destroyed hundreds of homes. Then we got what we call "monsoon" rains - summer rains that result in flash-floods. I was in Fort Collins in 1997, when it got hit with a sudden storm that dumped 10 inches of rain all at once, killing five people (IIRC), and causing massive flooding to the Colorado State University campus and other parts of Fort Collins.

Weather weirding. IMHO, that's the biggest danger. I wonder if global-climate-change induced weather-weirding contributed to Katrina.

The Los Alamos fire that burned many homes in that town was followed by some heavy rains that ran off the bare mountains and washed out bridges and parts of the town....they learned the value of a forest on the mountains....with no trees the water just ran of in a torrent.

On one of the MSNBC shows yesterday a guest was a small farm operator from a family that had owned that farm for decades. This year they lost their crops to drought and heat, last year to too much rain, the year before to too much cold. Originally the farm was a berry farm - the cold killed their plantings. Last year they moved to a CSA operation, but despite a variety of plantings, they lost nearly everything to excessive wet weather. This year they varied their CSA offerings, only to lose most to the drought.

They are in debt and at a loss as to what to try next since they cannot predict the weather pattern. The weather they have experienced in the last three years is nothing like anything they have experienced in the generations that have owned that farm.

CSA = community supported agriculture. A small farm model where the farm sells "subscriptions" to the crops and the consumer gets a variety of locally grown produce.

...but we are out if the state this week. Hubby got on our hometown tv-station website and read an article to me about the crop devastation this year. Due to drought and soaring temps, 75 percent of the corn crop is categorized as "fair to poor." I don't think most people understand how much of a catastrophe his is. Our state has been hit bad, but Indiana and Illinois are worse.

I've been watching the weather reports and it has been 100+ degrees every day this week. Some areas have experienced 110-115 degree temps. It's nuts.

This will definitely affect food prices--significantly.

Either 30% lower than normal or maybe 30% of normal. Either way it's a disaster and food prices will go way up this winter and stay up until the crop comes in next year - if it is good.

I am seriously considering buying a cow and breeding her every year. I was already thinking about it to sell grass fed beef but cattle farmers are going to be dumping cows this fall and I can get one for a good price, I bet. I may try chickens but with the predators they are harder for me to keep safe.

I wish I could have put in a garden but in four hours I have to be at the hospital for my second knee replacement this year. Maybe I can get a space ready for next spring - including electric fencing to keep the deer out of the garden!

They'll be growing, so there'd be even more Raygun Water.

Weather here in the SE has been freakish the past couple of years in many different ways. Climate change is detectable even without scientific instruments now. Truly frightening.

Can't wrap my head around it.

Plus the glaciers are calving huge tracks of ice into the ocean. Earlier this week, one calves off a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan.

The climate scientists are slack jawed at the apparent acceleration of the changes in global climate. Things are happening sooner than their projections predicted. That may be an indication that tipping points may have been passed. I am sure that they are looking long and hard to determine this.

R&K

Note mods: press release

From your posted release:

I'm not sure you grasp the concept of data collection vs. peer-review.

The "press release" you posted isn't science. A set of data is not science. A collection of pictures gathered from a satellite is doing not science.

Science is a process, not a collection of facts, or data, or pictures. Yes, it includes those things, but they are only one of the many starting points from which the processes of the scientific method works.

There is always peer review. Always! It is the one crucial thing which separates the discipline of science from others.

Every measurement in science is provisional. Every theory is provisional. Every conclusion is provisional. The only truth in science is nature herself. The universe is what the universe is.

We can understand a great many things about the universe, but there may be things we may never know. The body of theory approaches these truths, but never achieves it. However accurate our measurements, however accurate the predictions of our theories, there are always unknowns and uncertainties. No matter what we do.

There is likewise no authority in science; that also resides only in nature. Einstein is famous because he solved several knotty, important problems in 1905 and 1916-7. He spent the rest of his life as a justifiably revered scientist, but did nothing very significant after that. He even discounted quantum mechanics, a field which he helped pioneer, and for which he won the freaking Nobel prize, the photoelectric effect, which gave rise to confirmation of light as a quantized particle, the photon.

In spite of the respect science paid him, the science of the 20's and 30's passed him by. By the time he died in 1955, any authority he had resided solely in the papers he published which still stood up. Remarkably, they did well. Relativity has stood up to all challenges, both the electrodynamic version and the gravity version.

But his authority stands only to the extent that his explanations stand.

There is always peer review in science. To say otherwise is to be ignorant of how science works.

I hope I have been helpful.

And by the way, if I was one of the guys who got that satellite data on the Greenland Icesheet, I would want my name on the paper which would be published. And there is, or will be a paper. Because that's the way science works, too.

I sincerely apologize for the pedantry. You just seemed to need some help about the science thing. I apologize if I was mistaken.

Someone might take that data and write a paper in the future calculating trends, explaining contributing phenomenon, etc... No one is going to write a paper to simply report observational data. That's what press releases are for. NASA, the NCDC, and other agencies provide data continually without writing papers about the data -- yes, it is potentially subject to peer-review because the data is public but it doesn't go through a formal review process. To be sure, someone already has written a paper explaining how the satellite data collection works, how raw data is processed -- probably the same people that are identified in the press release. I bet those people would be offend to hear you say they aren't doing science.

If you want to compare degrees and C.V.s....

But this release is making conclusions about the data. It was my possibly presumptive assumption that a paper went along with it as that is common. After all the maps printed were colored to show the melt rate.

Sorry if my presumption was wrong. I just have this memory of making science announcements by press release without peer review. Remember Pons and Fleishman? (sp?) That didn't work out to well for them.

Claiming a melt like that in a few days is a bold claim, no matter the data. Somebody peer reviewed that, if only in house.

Just slightly differing perspectives. Message boards are not usually productive forums to discuss scientific philosophy and practices.

Text forums are difficult to communicate intent or emotion. I often will try to use a self-effacing sense of humor to preempt such misinterpretations. But, as we all here know, passion lets us all get away from how others interpret our missives.

Science rules! Except when professed here at DU.

Really silly, eh? But I like silly.

BTW, BS in physics. Long time mathematics teacher (HS and college), skeptic, and general curmudgeon.

Particularly if the warming continues as it is and just cascades further. Take the arctic sea ice melt, it'll amplify the Greenland melting, eventually there will be melting in longer intervals, etc. But yeah it will be some time before said papers exist and the data may not even be used that much (since scientifically you can't use short term trends to make a long term analysis; they will likely just mention it in passing at first, then as it worsens more papers will come out, etc).

What's interesting is that all the models have underestimated the melting by magnitudes. This wasn't supposed to happen until mid-century.

adapt.

One or the other should get on the same page.... not that it's surprising.

That means recovery will not be the same.

Nonetheless, the scientists said, the melt was significant because Greenland’s ice sheet is unequivocally shrinking as a result of the warming of the world’s oceans, and the event could help broaden their insights into climate change and earth systems.

as long as it does`t flip the current i think we`ll live through this event.

And get out those heavy sweaters.

It's going to get damn hot.

Hot, dry and wind. No off switch.

It's been hell because I work outside, so. Yeah.

although it's been a cooler than usual summer here around Anchorage, one of the coolest on record, with a lot of rain. We broke a snowfall record last winter, too. We don't know what to expect this winter.