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Any real scientists here that actually know what is really going on or are we all just looking at stuff that we are told.
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Well I guess I am a "real" scientist. I work primarily in the Oil and Gas industry and more recently in the Coal seam gas industry. I guess I am one of the bad guys as I am employed by the main industries who dont want climate change to be human driven. I started off very sceptical of the whole thing - after all scientists are renowned for not wanting to believe other scientists theories
For obvious reasons, Petroleum geoscientists have been discussing this issue for some time and opinions are still split. Of my immediate collegues I would say about 30% are still sceptics, 10% still fence sitting and the rest think we have a problem.
How serious is the problem? I dont know. I think now even the sceptics agree we are pumping out a heck of a lot of CO2. The debate still rages as to whether this will effect the earths climate. I am inclined to believe it will, both from what I have read and my own work in geology, but to what extent? I dont know - who does? We can try to model it but they are just models.
Modelling and understanding paleoenvironments is my daily job and one of the things you can see straight away is that climate and sea level change are complex things. It is not as simple as saying the temperature will have by x degrees for the ice caps to melt. There are a lot of other factors involved. For example, ocean currents have a huge effect on the planets ecosystem. You dont need a huge temperature rise to disrupt the ocean currents and that has serious knock on effects. The southern circumpolar current is keeping Antarctica nice and cold right now but what sort of temperature rise will we need to disrupt this current? I dont know, I am sure there are people out there who do.
One other thing I have seen is the work the CSIRO (I think it is them) have been doing on the effects of elevated CO2 levels on plant uptake and the results suggest there is a point where higher CO2 levels have an adverse effect on the plants health/growth/productivity and this could be a serious issue for food security as well as biodiversity. Once again it is the knock on effects of reducing plants ability take up CO2.
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Sure, there have been climate change before and, yes, it is constantly ongoing due to change in solar output, change in Earths orbit, the precession etc etc, but all happen over geologic time scales where ecosystems have time to adjust and evolve to suit the changing conditions. A rapid change, such as the one that might logically follow the current fast burning of all fossil fuels, will of course have catastrophic consequences for the global economy and for our biosphere as a whole. Yes, the Earth will keep spinning and we'll still be here, but it will make the recent financial crisis seem like a tiny blip.
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Sky viking has said it better than me so I will just quote.
This whole issue is so much more than plain temperature change. Once again I have to emphasise RATE OF CHANGE. A lot of the earths extinction events can be tied to what is termed "catastrophic" events. On the geological timescale human CO2 output is such an event. I know many sceptics will roll their eyes at the term as it sounds very tree huggy and emotional but in the geology world it really it is a term for a sudden, large change in conditions.
It is the catastrophic events which have the biggest impact on life. SkyViking has already pointed out the ecosystem does not have the time to adjust to such an event. Geological history has shown the earth does eventually adjust but takes a long time in the order of 1000s to millions of years and there are casualities.
I dont think we are engineering our own extinction (not yet anyway) but our way of life will change and our ecosystems will change. Vulnerable people and a lot of our wildlife will be effected. We, in the developed world, the ones causing the problem, may not even feel any effect but to say business as usual is a pretty selfish way to live. I feel we owe it to our children and our grand children and the planet which is our home to try to do something about this. I dont want to be telling my grandchildren they will never see the wonders of the Great barrier reef because I was too selfish and lazy to bother about changing my lifestyle to save it.
So what am I doing? Lets face it, I am a consumer like the rest of us, I have a comfy lifestyle and too big a carbon/pollution footprint, I work for big polluters. I am one of the bad guys. The answer is I am not doing enough. I have made some lifestyle changes (not enough by a long shot) but most of the time I just whinge about the authorities and hope I am wrong.
To the sceptics all I can say is please please be informed when you decide to take your stance. I want to be wrong, I really really want to be proven wrong.
If you choose not to believe in climate change that is fine but do your research read all of the work with an open mind. Not just the recent stuff. Scientists have been talking about this issue for more than 30 years. Dont just read the alarmist environmentalists articles or those of the vocal sceptics. A lot of work is being done by scientists around the world, most of which does not make it to the general public but it is out there. Read them, then make your decsion, this is too important an issue to just follow the masses.
I really think both sides of the debate need to stop slagging each other off and start to have some serious discussion instead of bickering about statistics and hockey sticks from one set of temperature data. The issue is so much more than that.