From the you’ve got to be effing kidding me department come this dead serious essay from “The Conversation”, that hotbed of climate alarmism in Australia which somehow got past bullshit detectors at phys.org.
The money quote sort of tries to talk down the headline, but they leave it wide open as a possibility.
David Waltham writes:
So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe? One problem may be climate change. It is not that advanced civilisations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility). Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.
The Earth has had 4 billion years of good weather despite our sun burning a lot more fuel than when Earth was formed. We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface. This is roughly the increased heating produced by carbon dioxide at the levels expected for the end of the 21st century. (Incidentally, that is where the IPCC prediction of global warming of around 3°C centigrade comes from.)
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-climate-contact-alien-civilisations.html#jCp
Is there anything climate change can’t do? I predict effects on black holes next.
On the plus side, Michael Mann must be relieved that the Green Lizards aren’t coming after him.
h/t to Marc Morano and Leif Svalgaard
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With our nearest stars between 5 and 15 light years away…I’m not going to worry too much about intergalactic invasions.
“Alan Robertson says:
June 10, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Klaatu barada nikto”
This is what happens when you get it wrong;
Exactly!
Were interstellar space-faring intelligence common (even as ‘common’ as one per galaxy per million years), Earth would have been colonized by another race long ago.
The similarity of human DNA to that of every other Earth creature rules out the possibility that humans were planted here as a colony.
If faster than light travel is possible, the limit on expansion is population growth, and any race with a rate of population doubling close to that of humans could populate the galaxy in mere thousands of years. If not, it’s absurd to think that aliens would spend decades in travel just to visit the Earth.
We have not been visited.
I can think of a few reasons we haven’t been visited.
For one, just as in every human society, there are laws. Maybe in a larger society, one of the laws is to leave young civilizations alone. Or there may be other, unkown frontiers that are much more interesting and/or imperative, and which do not require interstellar expansion. Or, solipsism: I might be the only entity in existence, and everything else is a figment of my imagination… OK, that one isn’t as likely. But it is more likely than climate change.
The fact is that we haven’t been contacted. That is the only verifiable fact. So that leaves a lot of possibilities open. Except for climate change. We have to draw the line somewhere.
I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.
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They’re hiding behind the missing heat?
Or maybe they only hang around planets that don’t rotate and don’t revolve around a sun? Such a planet would liking have a climate that didn’t change much.
more soylent green! says:
June 11, 2014 at 12:07 pm
“I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.”
With what I have seen in Vegas my bet is that they are already here. But as we all know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so the rest of us will never find out.
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“It’s a cookbook!”
Maybe they’re just waiting until we preheat ourselves?
The “cold sun paradox” is important, and is strong evidence in favor of theories of broad climate stability like Willis’ thermostat hypothesis and Claes Johnson’s calculations for how a slower hydrological cycle would increase the lapse rate (concentrating warmth closer to the surface). Trying to tie it to anthropogenic or alienogenic climate change is of course absurd. Super slow changes are being lumped with changes that sentient agents make quickly and can react to quickly? The slow solar change and how pre-technological life was able to survive it is a real conundrum, but of all the ways technological life could kill itself off, climate change seems way down on the list.
The real reason we haven’t seen any space aliens.
Hmmph. Obviously they haven’t watched The Arrival: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrival_%28film%29. It’s global warming that brings the aliens.
The errors, illogicalities, unsustainable chains of inference, one dimensional thinking and over-arching utter intellectual deficiency are quite simply breathtaking.
One reason may be that they are observing climate changers lying to everyone to further their agendas and the aliens think: “What a bunch of dicks. Why do they lie and manipulate each other to make money?”
“Who wants to hang around with assholes like them?”
“Let’s check that planet out, over there. I hear they actually allow their people to grow organic without trampling their property.”
Great! One less threat to worry about. I never did like the idea of becoming a “food source”. I assume the food chain does not stop with the earth. LOL
“I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.”
Now I know why Las Vegas is the gambling capital of US and casinos are making a killing.
The physorg title completely misrepresents the article. The title assigned by an editor at The Conversation–“Why haven’t we encountered aliens yet? The answer could be climate change”–is at least a reasonable summary of the argument.
Waltham doesn’t seem to realize that without apocalyptic “climate change” guaranteed by predictable stellar evolution to motivate a seriously intelligent species to leave home, there would be no Fermi Paradox. So it is not the “solution” he seems to think it is, but part of the “paradox” package.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface.
Isn’t it marvelous how these climate modelers can bend the laws of physics to their wishes? It’s as if they have rescinded the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which ordains that a 1% increase of surface heating would produce global warming at the surface of about 0.7°C on current temperatures, not “a few degrees centigrade” as claimed.
I guess they must hail from a different universe to ours which operates by different physical laws. Hence their confusion.