Dear Max Green,

My research entails finding out what scientists and scholars are saying about the environment (particularly water). The emerging picture is a lot worse than climatologists were initially predicting and it's looking like we have reached a tipping point where it will be impossible to undo the damage caused by ongoing use of fossil fuels.

One critic, Roy Stranton, has written a short book Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, which basically says that the gig is up, it's too late, and we should be teaching ourselves how to accept the extinction of our species as a consequence of AGW.

But I highly recommend the books of Brian Fagan, an internationally recognised archaeologist of the highest repute and one of my earliest reads in my first year of my anthropology degree.

To fully understand AGW and climate change requires an interdisciplinary approach, which needs to take account of both the sciences and the humanities to give us the big picture.

Interesting stuff that fascinates me as a sociologist but unfortunately it looks like we are all looking down the barrel of an extinction event.

Max Green, Mr Opinion let me be honest I am not near as well educated as you two
But read extensively and my fears are real. like climate change
My main concerns is not the deniers, time will defeat them
But rainfall and ocean currents
My reading has shown England, if it's warmer current stops working may become unlivable
Rain? we are getting more droughts more often
Aware SOME parts of the planet will be greener/wetter what if part or all of our country is not that lucky
Time and truth are on our side too the momentum being built up by renewables being used and planned right now
I see a future day when polutors may face trade embargo if they refuse to take action on climate change

Dear Belly,

I think Max Green has convincingly warned against putting our hopes in renewables to get rid of the problem. I'm sure Max can elaborate on that issue.

I'm glad you raised the issue of water - my favourite topic.

Yes the great thermohaline global current can come to a halt under certain conditions stopping the Gulf Stream bringing warm water to the west of the UK which produces the rainy weather the UK is so famous for. It can also do other drastic things to weather around the world. Did you catch the movie The Day After Tomorrow which was about that type of event.

Everything is interrelated. Did you know that 40% of the planet's CO2 is held by our oceans. As the oceans warm they cannot hold as much CO2 releasing it into the atmosphere which in turn increases to greenhouse gas effect.

Let's hope an El Nino doesn't kick in this January otherwise things in Australia will just become disastrous for a lot of country folk.

MHAZE,
On the pre 1940 issue:
* are we to trust the temperature datasets or not? ;-)
* Have they been homogenised or not? ;-)
* Why did you prefer unhomogenised? ;-)
* Why did you dismiss the studies in the link I shared?
* What don’t you like about their science?
* What links do you have that demonstrate that the pre 1940 temperatures somehow contradict our understanding of climate science?
* Is this your ONLY ‘evidence’ or ‘argument’ or ‘inkling’ that pushes your scepticism into overt paranoia that “they” are cooking up a story but in your ‘reality’ we still really truly wooly don’t know how to do climate change models yet?
(Despite getting those computer models and running them backwards against historical records and confirming that they work!)
* Who is this they, and how much cool-aid does one have to swallow to see them?
* On the other matters — you’re sulking and redirecting now. Repeatedly going over and over them again over them yet again would be to utterly boring to contemplate.
* When was the last time you had a BBQ with some mates or turned off the computer and went outside and spoke to another actual human being? I think you should; you're getting some kind of sad reward cooped up in your room arguing with people that accept regular science like us 'alarmists'. (We're not the ones pushing an all powerful global conspiracy that goes back 163 years to Eunice Foote! Talk about an alarming worldview! You tinfoil hatters must be freaked out — except you secretly know your conspiracies just are not true!) It's sad when negative attention is better than no attention. I think you should get out for a bit, OK?

Just an example of what can happen,
driving from Glen Innes towards Inverell (on the way home0), there was a bush fire to the north of the Gwydir Highway, glow in the sky and enough smoke for the headlights to be on.
Then ran into the heaviest rain in a storm that I've experienced for at least thirty years, if not longer,
Conditions became so dangerous, with visibility down to 50 feet or less that I pulled off the road at a wide point and put the hazard lights on. soon joined by four other vehicles, we sat it out for some ten minutes before it eased off enough to safely proceed.

Nice bit of rain though.

Hi BELLY & MR OPINION,
Belly — don't be too down on yourself. At least you are open to the science! I'm not a scientist. To my shame I almost sided with the deniers at one point in my life, after seeing "The Great Global Warming Swindle". I was just ignorant about it all — completely unread. I had denialist friends. But when I researched each and every claim from that movie, I discovered very clever half-truths, or outright lies! It just takes knowing some of the better websites to read and a few youtube channels. Then you can research the real peer-reviewed science from the sneaky little tactics of the attention-seeking trolls in here.
Always start here. http://skepticalscience.com/

Back to the risks of climate change. Not many climatologists go the whole way to predicting extinction for us. Let's face it, we're planning a city on Mars which is a thousand times harder than life here on earth. But that's the pinnacle of our scientific elite using the most expensive, state of the art equipment in human history. It's not your African hunters or your Indian rice farmers or South American indigenous tribe. Or even a Texan rancher! I'm not predicting the extinction of human life, but if we really stuff up maybe half the human race and half the ecosystems going extinct.

AS MR OPINION SAYS — to assess the risks, one needs to read the scientific consensus, have some basic economics and then model in some realpolitik. In other words, sociology, which I have an Advanced Diploma in.

Water wars are our greatest risk. For every 1 warmer it gets, the atmosphere can hold 5% more water which is faster drying and greater deluges. Famines and floods. It means America going dustbowl again, permanently. Globally 25% less grain as we head towards 9 billion by 2050!

This 2009 video shows more on climate models, including Hansen just outright guessing on a volcano! http://youtu.be/D6Un69RMNSw

This one is on SRM. If we use it right, it could give us decades more time. Wrong, and we may start WW3!
http://youtu.be/wdQRPUtVrSc