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0 pointsglenra11y ago0 comments

>The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now.

To say "it's irreversible now" is to imply there was ever a point that it wasn't, a point at which there was something we could have done to change trends at this scale. The links you gave don't really suggest this to be the case.

BTW, David Suzuki is a fearmonger with a long history of making ridiculous unscientific doomsday claims. For instance, he claimed that a second Fukushima disaster would force evacuation of the west coast of America:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/20/david-suzuki-regrets...

So if you really want to claim the earth is likely to be "uninhabitable in only some decades" you probably want to use somebody else as a source.

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couchnaut11y ago

Of course there was a point that this was not irreversible. That's what the notion of "tipping point" implies.

The links were selected somewhat in a haste but nevertheless you can come up with your own sources easily. Most of the "alarmists" have been warning and calling to action for decades now. For various reasons I had not read any of them for the past years which is why the irreversibility was news to me.

glenraOP11y ago

Reading the first link you posted, its only mention of "tipping point" is to say:

> Although the summary of the report doesn’t expressly use the term “tipping point” to described the changes in climate, it acknowledges that in many cases they are irreversible

So: (1) The IPCC doesn't say there's a tipping point.

(2) The source you give mentions "irreversible" but doesn't say "now irreversible".

The fact that the climate is changing in some direction or other does not mean we can reverse that change, much less that it's worth doing so. Even if we're causing it.

The second link you posted seems to be a 70-minute video featuring a bunch of activists, with no text summary to explain why it should be interesting or relevant - no WONDER you didn't get lots of upvotes! (I haven't watched it, but would be happy to skim a transcript, a summary, or an article on the same subject).

The third link you posted does mention tipping points, but not based on any recent news or anything the IPCC just said. It's an essay written by some dude who is quite alarmed about things, referring as a source back to a essay written by some other dude last year which in turn refers back to papers in 2007 and 2012. There doesn't seem to be any NEW information about "tipping points" therein. Yes, people were talking about speculative "tipping points" back in 2007. Most of that sort of talk has been dialed way back since then, in large part because nature didn't cooperate. Surface warming trends are flat, and weather isn't notably more "extreme" that it has been in the past.

Actually, it's worse than that. When you look at the specifics of HOW the IPCC thinks we're currently being impacted by climate, a huge negative current impact they note is the damage done by a rise in food prices, a rise which was in large part caused by crop diversion for use in biofuels. Which is to say, a misguided program from the past that was allegedly intended to help the environment, hurt us all on a global scale. If in 2007 the US had simply taken a chill pill and ignored the IPCC's warnings rather than instituting more of a biofuels mandate, we'd all be better off today; the measurable current harm from climate change would be a fraction of what it is and we'd have released less net CO2.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10716756/Biofuels-do...

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-biofuel-hope-that-beats...

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