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Climate Change & Toronto

AoD, the ecosystem may survive in some form, but looking at the current rate of extinction it's fair to say habitat destruction and climate change are unleashing what conservation biologists call the 6th extinction.

Many of the species alive today will be gone to never return, and they may take us with them.
 
TOperson said:
I've also read that as early as the 1930s, ordinary people noticed changes - winters not as cold and so on. An ancient glacier in Iceland started melting around that time. So the current change might be more than a hundred years in the making. It makes sense, given that we started burning big amounts of fossil fuels around 1800.
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Just for the record, in the 70s the general concern was global cooling. TIME and Newsweek had stories about it.
 
Ben Shapiro is an imbecile, but people who are swayed by what he writes should stay at home at all times.

As I posted before, 97% of scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is taking place. Now, if you think that scientists are conspiring together to a certain end, you just have no idea how science works in the western world.

The real extremism exists at the other end of the spectrum, where people are consciously and deliberately making a fortune by destroying the planet, wasting our natural resources, and putting our long-term existence at risk.
 
Posted banned for multiple offenses: multiple signups (within the span of 3 hours), previously banned member, posting of copyrighted materials.

AoD
 
GenerationW said:
Just for the record, in the 70s the general concern was global cooling. TIME and Newsweek had stories about it.
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Actually, this is not really true. In the 1970s, climate scientists knew that the huge anthropogenic inputs (mainly CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that cause warming, but also particulates that cause cooling) were likely to have a dramatic impact on the global climate system, but the models of the time were too crude to accurately predict which way the climate would go. The scientists themselves were split on whether we would see warming or cooling, but were agreed that the magnitude of the opposing forces were so great that major changes were inevitable. It was the news magazines that loudly proclaimed "global cooling" (and even then, I believe that they ran only a few covers on the issue), even though there was no scientific consensus on the idea.

Since then, the models have become far more sophisticated, and particulate emissions that act to cool the lower troposphere are much reduced from the 1970s, and there is no longer any doubt whatsoever (except among anti-science denialists) that we are facing massive global warming.
 
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Mongo:

Interesting you brought that up - the whole issue really didn't enter the mainstream until the 80s - I recall even though the mechanisms were already know. Same goes for CFCs and the ozone hole.

AoD
 
I recall seeing a program that was suggesting that the amount of pollution in Asia is actually having a cooling effect because the sun can't reach the earth with the same intensity in that part of the world. But for us here in Canada and all Northern climates warming is occuring. Try telling someone who lives in the Arctic that warming isn't real!

The point I always make in these discussions is that global warming is a symptom not the disease. I also find claims regarding the impact on humanity of climate change way over exaggerated. This will have real important impacts on people and some populations around the world will suffer greatly but humans won't go extinct and we won't even die in great numbers. Our quality of life and the assumption that human development goes from lower to higher standard of living will definately be tested. I think we live in an age where an inflection point will be reached and the standard of living of much of the world's population will rise and then stagnate. In other words the world will reach a carrying capacity not for the number of humans but for the number of humans that can live at a high standard of living with a comfortable level of material affluence.
 
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TrickyRicky said:
I recall seeing a program that was suggesting that the amount of pollution in Asia is actually having a cooling effect because the sun can't reach the earth with the same intensity in that part of the world. But for us here in Canada and all Northern climates warming is occuring. Try telling someone who lives in the Arctic that warming isn't real!

The point I always make in these discussions is that global warming is a symptom not the disease. I also find claims regarding the impact on humanity of climate change way over exaggerated. This will have real important impacts on people and some populations around the world will suffer greatly but humans won't go extinct and we won't even die in great numbers. Our quality of life and the assumption that human development goes from lower to higher standard of living will definately be tested. I think we live in an age where an inflection point will be reached and the standard of living of much of the world's population will rise and then stagnate. In other words the world will reach a carrying capacity not for the number of humans but for the number of humans that can live at a high standard of living with a comfortable level of material affluence.
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The topic is preparing Toronto for climate change, not a generalized "what I believe about climate change". Re: those populations that will suffer greatly, should we not try to do something for them? Particularly if they live right here?
 
If I recall correctly, the consensus from climate models is that some time in the second half of the 21st century, Toronto’s mean temperature will be 4 to 5 degrees warmer than baseline twelve months a year, giving us a climate more or less like Philadelphia’s today. That actually seems like an improvement. We also have a staggering amount of fresh water in the Great Lakes, so drought won’t be an issue. I accept that a lot of very smart people think that climate change will be terrible for Toronto. Is it the case that the models also forecast negatives to outweighs the positive of it not being so miserably cold for so much of the year? For example, will a massive increase in the standard deviation of temperature around the mean lead to costly and prolonged extremes of heat and cold? Or will the increased incidence of very heavy precipitation events create problems? Or is the argument that while Toronto and Canada may actually benefit from climate change, it will be a net negative for the rest of the world and we should therefore spend large to reduce our CO2 emissions on moral grounds.
 
Ice wine harvests need low temperatures of -8°C or lower. They may end up moving grape fields northward.

The skiing venues may experience lack of snow, which we have had years like that before. Maybe not this year, but the snow may not stick around for the March break.
 
The warming also increases the likelihood of powerful damaging storms, and if the higher levels of water in the great lakes are a trend induced by global warming we'll likely also be losing a good portion of our waterfront.
 
ttk77 said:
The warming also increases the likelihood of powerful damaging storms, and if the higher levels of water in the great lakes are a trend induced by global warming we'll likely also be losing a good portion of our waterfront.
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The Port Lands development, and just about any new developments that border the Great Lakes, should consider the high lake levels of 2017 PLUS two metres for storm waves, in their plans.
 
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