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Last edited Tue Jun 24, 2014, 10:19 PM - Edit history (2)

[font color = blue] >> 43. Sorry, but I'm not giving China & India a pass just so they can "catch up" to western living

A lot of things USED to be done that we know now NOT to do. Should we let poorer countries do anything just to improve their standard of living? <<[/font]

Well, have you considered then that maybe, instead of a trivial reduction of a few percent from levels that are still far higher than China & India levels per capita, we should reduce emissions to China's and India's levels per capita? Not to mention that cumulatively, over the past centuries, the U.S. has emitted far more CO2 than both those countries combined? Not just on a per-capita basis but in tons of CO2.

[font color = red]Edited to Add, 6/24 1105a CT:[/font] And again, much U.S. manufacturing has gone overseas in the last decades, to places like China. China is producing substantial levels of CO2 to produce products that are consumed in the U.S. I think it’s primarily the U.S. that should be blamed for CO2 caused by hoggish (relative to non-Western countries) U.S. consumers.

We (all countries) will have to make sacrifices to solve this problem. I'm just saying that since we (the western nations) created most of the problem, any notion of fairness means we should make the biggest sacrifices. By far.

[font color = blue] >> You say a bad economy is what caused our reductions? The 90s was a boom decade. We've been putting out less since '93, which is also well before fracking produced very much volume. <<[/font]

U.S. CO2 emissions rose through the 1990s and early- and mid- 2000s, to peak in 2007, which was also the last year before the financial crash hit full force.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html

The title of the below graph is: U.S. Carbon Dioxide Gas Emissions, 1990-2012 (I don't know why it got lopped off)



And fracking is a big factor since 2007, which wasn't much of a factor before 2007.

The U.S.'s CO2 reductions since 2007 were the result of a poor economy and market-place economics (fracking being cheaper than coal), not from any sacrifice on our part.

[font color = blue] >> But I'm not convinced that we are the main cause of any warming going on. <<[/font]

Cumulatively, the U.S. has put out much more CO2 into the atmosphere than China and India combined. Who is "we", by the way? U.S.? The world? It's not humans, its sunspots?

World temperatures have risen about 0.8 deg C (1.4 deg F) since pre-industrial times.

The entire decade of 2000 to 2009 was the warmest on record, according to NOAA., AP 5/31/12

And the average temperature in the decade of the 1990s was warmer than any previous decade since records began. Surpassed only by the 2000's.

2013 was the 37th year in a row that global temps were above 20th century average. 9 of the 10 warmest years all occurred during the 13 years of the 21st century

[font color = blue] >>Not to mention the stories about fudged data that keep showing up. Here's one from just yesterday:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

<<[/font]

Hmm, interesting title, "The scandal of fiddled global warming data The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record"

You can find all kinds of right wing whack-a-doodle stories all over the Internet written by carbon industry - paid hacks. They are not hard to find if you look for them.

Have you ever read the book "Doubt Is Their Product" ?

[font color = blue] >>I certainly believe we should continue to improve on what we've already done. <<[/font]

Good, so you believe what 97% of climate scientists believe, despite the right-wing hacks

[font color = blue] >>I just don't know who has the smarts to say that the temperature right now is exactly where we have to be. <<[/font]

Dunno either. But rising sea level (caused by global warming) is a problem.

Melting glaciers and snow-packs is a big problem. The snow and ice that accumulate in the mountains in winter act as big water reservoirs that feed the rivers that flow from them during the growing season and make agriculture possible in many areas (as it is, we're rapidly depleting ground water which is expensive and energy-intensive to pump). These snow and ice packs are rapidly shrinking and disappearing.

40% phytoplankton decline - a study published in Nature in July found that global populations of phytoplankton have declined about 40% since 1950, linked with "increasing sea surface temperatures" -- Nation 1/31/11

Ocean acidification and coral reefs dying....