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

[mikandra]

I think you can say several things about this.

The fact that some people seem to think that climate is a static thing is a furphy. It isn't and has never been. Fairly 'catastrophic' climate changes are as old as earth itself. That this one is probably human-induced cannot be denied, I think. That the climate will re-settle into another equilibrium (possibly unhealthy for us) can also not be denied. After all, we cannot release any more CO2 than went into producing all that oil in the first place. Whether it's in our power to do anything about it remains to be seen.

[nyssa_p]

Ice Age anyone?

I don't get how they can be so fking uptight about it and say "well I don't see anything happening!". It's like people who say they don't see changes happening in their dogs on a day to day basis deny evolution (and yes, I have heard someone say that!)

[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

[adamhenderson]

Yeah, particularly the ones who don't want 'ugly' wind turbines ruining the view from their kitchen windows.

Bah, these days I don't even try to understand people, I just assume that everyone I don't know is stupid until they prove me wrong. I'd much rather be pleasantly surprised every now and then than constantly disappointed :-D. But I suspect that humanity is moving in the 'Too Stupid To Survive' category of the evolutionary chain alongside the dodo (and pandas, grrrr!!)

[nyssa_p]

One of the green houses I saw on that ABC show actually had a wind turbine in their garden! It was in San Fransisco (sp?) and the house owner actually were paid to do it, because they claimed it was an 'experiment' to test the technology!

Bloody gorgeous house design!

And theres a lot of others that use almost all recycled material. A few that reuse old factories or warehouses to create their home.

Did I mention I like that show? :P