For the scientists out there

[nyssa_p]

So in watching question time, this is what the climate change skeptics are holding to

"Global cooling would kill more people than global warming

Comments

[girliejones]

Desalination plants produce expensive water - expensive to run and byproducts that are unusable. And they don't address sustainability but rather encourage more consumption without addressing serious issues such as wastefulness.
But they will provide water for drinking and you can't argue with that.

And yep, flowers will enjoy more CO2, we'll be fucked and dead but the flowers will be pretty :)

[nyssa_p]

Can grey water systems be put into houses that are already built? Or basically is it easier to build them before the house? Don't know much, but I know that program on the abc about green houses usually have the most awesome architecture!

My old biology teacher got really pissed off when the principal decided to have tropical plants in really hot areas and then they died, so they just got new tropical plants rather than getting ones that actually suit the environment. And also that guy who I used to live next door to who would hose leaves off his driveway -_-

Yay pretty flowers!

[girliejones]

It's cheaper and easier to build grey water systems in new houses than to retrofit. I don't know how much cheaper ...

[punktortoise]

There's no guarantee that the flowers *would* be pretty. It's not completely off the cards that Earth could go the 'runaway greenhouse' route, on a geologically short timescale. I haven't attempted the math, but I suspect there's sufficient accessible carbon within the biosphere (including the oceans) to ramp global temperatures up sufficiently high that liquid water becomes a rarity, and then an impossibility.

I suspect (again, I haven't done the math) that it'd take a few thousand years to get *that* bad. So we won't see it, nor our grandchildren, but it certainly has the potential to be decidedly unpleasant well before then. Anyone who thinks we don't need to be acting on it already, to minimise the damage which is already inevitable, has their head well-and-truly in the sand.

If the means existed, I reckon the best promotion for getting some action on climate change would be sending the most prominent sceptics to Venus on an educational tour. Probably a day there would be sufficient...

My, aren't I in a cheerful mood this

[punktortoise]

Actually, come to that, all this talk about rising sea levels is such a short-term viewpoint. Once it gets hot enough, the sea levels will drop...

[nyssa_p]

Either way, it doesn't sound like fun! :P

[girliejones]

I was being cheeky, of course.

I was thinking about this the other day and I realised that in my day, where I work with other scientists, planners, policy makers and so on, I have not actually met a climate skeptic. Whilst this rubbish debate goes on in the media and parliament, where people talk about science as something to believe in or not, like angels and magic, the rest of us are just getting on with the working from here, climate change inevitability as base case.

[nyssa_p]

I burst out in laughter when I read that some people compare science to magic, but looking back, that's actually really, really sad and not funny. What are these idiots in parliment DOING?!

[girliejones]

They're comparing science to magic and in so doing they are dumbing us down and once again showing disrespect for academia, research and intelligentsia. It's not new. This country systematically does this.

[nyssa_p]

That's really disturbing.

And it makes me even MORE pissed off that sports are crying poor and we won't get a bunch of petty metals and ribbons if we don't give THEM millions (or was it a billion?) of dollars.

[nyssa_p]

Bit hot on Venus, isn't it? ;)

[punktortoise]

Yeah, just a tad warm. I think the longest-surviving probe to land there withstood conditions for maybe thirty minutes before it was melted beyond all usefulness.

Earth probably wouldn't get *that* warm - we're further from the Sun and all - but once the mercury climbs up above 100 celsius, it all gets just that slightest bit academic...