Posted on 04/23/2006 9:16:14 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
BERKELEY — Outside had all the makings of a beautiful Earth Day. Inside, however, at the inaugural event of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, there was nothing but doom and gloom for the future.
None of the trend lines identified by any of the four University of California, Berkeley-affiliated experts gathered Saturday looked sustainable.
Energy use that will send sea levels rising 10, 15, possibly even 220 feet above where they are now. A need for new housing in the next 30 years that equals fully half the total housing covering the planet today. Obesity, heart disease and cancer rates all rising at rates that, if left unchecked over those 30 years, will bankrupt our already taxed health care system. "This is a revolution," said Harrison Fraker, dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, to the nearly 50 students and attendees of the panel discussion. "It's yours."
The Berkeley institute was formed last year to cross-pollinate the science of the environment with the goal of addressing some of these problems in new and innovative ways.
Fraker was among the loudest to denounce the status quo. But he was also the first to note the technology that needs to change is already on the shelf.
"We (just) haven't developed the political and market systems" willing to apply that technology, he said.
What will it take? "A year with four or five (hurricane) Katrinas."
That may not be too far off. Inez Fung, co-director of the institute and a professor in the university's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has spent 20 years crunching numbers trying to predict climate change.
She's one of the world's foremost global warming theoreticians. And what startles her today is that worldwide observations perfectly mimic her predictions. The five warmest years on record since humans began recording the temperature were 1998 and 2002 through 2005, she said. And the way Mother Nature deals with that heat, the panel noted, "is to really stir up the weather."
She says it's unfortunate the predictions are coming true.
"It is no longer a theoretical problem when we look at Katrina," she said.
In the past 200 years, the sea has risen about 5 inches. In the past decade, it's risen another 5. If Greenland's ice cap melts — something Fung and other scientists say is quite possible — the sea could rise 220 feet.
That would turn the Napa Valley into an arm of San Francisco Bay.
But the loss of a fine Chardonnay is the least of our worries. China in the next 30 years needs enough housing to equal just about half of everything humans have built over the past 1,000, Fraker said. Right now, they're building new homes following the model developed here — with the assumption owners will have automobiles to cart them from home to store and school and work.
It's a model that needs the construction of three 300 megawatt power plants per week to meet energy demands.
"We have very difficult decisions to make," said Cymie Payne, a former United Nations attorney who now is the associate director of the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy.
"We have to decide what we want to save. We have to decide how we're going to make those decisions. And we have to decide how we're going to carry out those decisions."
But in some ways the market is already driving certain decisions.
Insurance companies, reading the climate forecast, have started to raise rates for low-lying areas. Gasoline's price spike has sent SUV sales tumbling. Sales of the Ford Explorer, the nation's best-selling SUV, dropped 25 percent the first four months this year after falling 29 percent in 2005, Bloomberg News reported last week.
The point is, said David Sedlak, a professor who studies the annoying tendency of modern synthetic chemicals to contaminate water, "we don't know how we're going to get there."
But we're going to, the panel agreed.
Because on this 36th Earth Day, despite much improvement in the past three decades, these researchers felt the status quo isn't enough.
"We have to make some real changes," Fraker said. "We can't just muddle along."
More information about the Berkeley Institute of the Environment can be found on the Web at http://bie.berkeley.edu
Think of the wine that would be destroyed!
You can always tell when grants are up for renewal--the levels of despair and alarm rise exponentially.
It doesn't appear to have worked. This is the same self-promoting hubris that has been the core of the global warming movement since it was the global cooling movement.
Is that considered to be a circle or a cluster?
This global warming garbage reminds me of the Salem witch hysteria. So when do these untenured con-men fall to the floor, stomp their little socialist feet and see visions of horned griffins flying out of their butts?
Thanks to finnman69 for this link and info re: global warming..
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1620000/posts?page=7#7
If it sounds too bad or too good to be true it probably isn't true.
If the ice were floating in the ocean and melted then your ice-in-the-cup analogy works. If it's on land (Greenland, Antarctica) and melts and flows into the ocean, then the ocean level would rise, although how much is hotly debated (pardon the pun).
It's been explained here about a billion times already but I hate to see Freepers look foolish, so...
Not all of the ice that could melt is in water. Vast land areas are covered by snow and ice and any meltwater would flow into the oceans, raising their levels. It's a natural cyclic process that's happened many times in the geologic past. Look at any good relief map showing California's central valley, now an agricultural powerhouse. Anyone can easily see it used to be an inland sea with access to the Pacific through the Sacramento Delta region and San Francisco Bay.
There probably is some 'global warming' but any human contribution to it is questionable. What I'm waiting to hear these Berkeley geniuses reveal is a 'solution' that doesn't involve, first and foremost, redistribution of American wealth to the Third World in a program managed by Marxists/socialists.
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica = 15.5 million sq km.
World's oceans equal 361.1 million sq km.
Density of ice vs. water is .93
SO...... Every foot of sea level rise would require more than 27 feet of ice to melt from every ice sheet. I would like to know how long that will take.
Now how long will it take for 270 feet to melt?
How much ice is there total in above sea level ice sheets? Does anyone know?
It's been explained here about a billion times already but I hate to see Freepers look foolish, so...
Well whatjaknow ....
Our world model was built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern – accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.The model we have constructed is, like every model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished.
In spite of the preliminary state of our work, we believe it is important to publish the model and our findings now. ...
We feel that the model described here is already sufficiently developed to be of some use to decision-makers. Furthermore, the basic behavior modes we have already observed in this model appear to be so fundamental and general that we do not expect our broad conclusions to be substantially altered by further revisions.
Our conclusions are:
1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
blah, blah, blah.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
"In the past 200 years, the sea has risen about 5 inches. In the past decade, it's risen another 5."
I would like to see the study that shows this.
The last I heard, the northern hemisphere measurements show about .0001" per day; far short of 1/2" per year.
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