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UK Releases Global Warming Report
ben_ writes "The UK Government's Foresight Project, tasked with visualizing the future, has published a hard-hitting report on the flooding consequences of global warming. The story's also on the BBC."
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Is there really any way the modern world will slow down to accomodate the environment? Personally I think most leaders have already thrown in the towel. Our best bet is to fund family planning to prevent the 6 kids per family that we see in some countries. The planet just can't sustain 11 billion people.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
I'm usually one to jump on the Stop Global Warming bandwagon, but the pretty picture in the BBC article sure does seem to indicate a large range of probablities between the "best case" and "worst case" scenarios.
In the "worst case", the entirity of the British Isles are inundated.
In the "best case", everything but the coastline becomes a desert.
While this looks like very good science, it's not going to be very useful as a basis for public policy. Science is all about showing all possible outcomes, in hopes of divining the truth. Public policy tends towards simple, overly general statements like "Global Warming will flood London" or "There is no threat from Global Warming". To the frustration of many, I'm sure, this report seems to support both positions.
On a technical note, when I hit the Executive Summary page before the Slashdot story went live, around 11am CDT, it said "This document has been accessed 361 times." A refresh a few minutes later bumped it up to 369, so it's a real-time counter. It'll be interesting to see how the Slashdot effect changes that number, and whether the counter survives the Local Warming of their web server.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
There's miles and miles of ice over Antarctica (a land mass). If it all melts, ocean levels will rise. However, if the Artic ice cap melts, ocean levels will be unaffected, because it's already floating.
The greatest threat from global warming isn't rising sea levels, it's global climate change that will destroy most of the current 'breadbaskets' of the world. Not only that, but the increase in the amount of energy in the weather system of the planet will create more powerful storms, causing worse floods, and making them more erratic, meaning the land will dry out, and then it will rain heavily, washing away topsoil.
I think if you didn't call it global warming, but called it global climate change, more people would have
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
1. There's been a measured increase in Solar activity and radiation, which is *where* we get our heat from, obviously. Once the Sun gets over it's current temper tantrum, temperatures will get more moderate.
2. If Dinosaurs ruled a tropical paradise 65 million years ago, wouldn't the current trend of Global Warming just be the Earth returning to a Tropical state?
3. Isn't is just a little bit arrogant on the part of humanity to assume that we really affect the environment that much? What about bovine methane? What about a single volcanic eruption spewing more CFC's then we've ever thought about using?
I mean, even the Russians are saying Kyoto just kills economies...
I think this was just sponsored by the upcoming release of "The Day After Tomorrow." We all know that global warming is happening, it's just extra convenient that this comes out right when a movie with a similar plot is about to come out.
stuff |
Global Warming may not exist. What should we do? We have two possibilities: Take measures to curb CO2 emissions, or go on like we always have. If we go on like we always have and global warming does exist, we're screwed. If we go on like we always have and global warming doesn't exist, we'll be fine. If we take measures and global warming does exist, we save ourselves. If we take measures and global warming does not exist, we lose some money.
Clearly, the cost/benefit/risk assesment points to taking measures now, because the possible cost of not taking measures (end of civilzation) is far too great.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I've seen some responses already that doubt global warming, which is good, and they're more articulate than usual.
Yes, global warming is real. Do we have anything to do with it? Probably not. Claims that our production of carbon dioxide will destroy life as we know it demonstrate ignorance of how the entire carbon cycle works. Plankton and plants absolutely THRIVE on carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen as waste. This is elementary school biology, folks.
The Earth will not bake us to oblivion, and we will not cause some horrific ice age. Things we DO need to be concerned about are ozone depletion and deforestation, because these directly affect the chemical cycle of this planet. The fact is, we simply don't know enough about the long-term trends of terrestrial climate to make credible doomsday scenarios. As it is, we are recovering from the "Little Ice Age," which means we're going to warm up. The planet has its own way of keeping the climate stable and self-sustaining. Thinking humans can make or break it is arrogant and egotistical, to say the least.
I am not a climatologist, but I wish people would avoid jumping onto bandwagons whose positions they have not examined with any depth.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
. . . they'd be called F.U.D.
Follow the money, and ask yourself:
Who is more likely to be venal, deceptive, and prone to manipulate data:
Flacks for fossil fuel industries and pro-business think tanks, or atmospheric scientists and climatologists?
it's really not popular, but I don't agree with the doomsday global warming scenarios either. ...I mean, even the Russians are saying Kyoto just kills economies...
Cool! So if we don't agree with scientific findings or worse yet, if those findings might cost us money, then those findings are not valid?
I guess the people who are trying to wish away evolution are going to wish away global warming as well.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future
You really think so? It's been widely suggested that among the top three modern contenders - global nuclear war, asteroid strike, and ecological disaster - none would quite do the trick. A nasty enough asteroid strike might reduce the population down to a few thousand or even a few hundred humans wealthy or powerful enough to live in shelters for a century or two... but probably not extinct us as a species.
Today, other than essentially irrelevent theories like "We're actually living in a computer simulation and it gets shut down" or "alien species decide to exterminate us" (irrelevant because little or nothing can be done even if they are possible), about the only reasonable chance we seem to have of causing our own extinction is nano-terrorism - the "grey goo" scenario. And, really, that may not turn out to be any more reasonable than yesterday's fear that "a nuclear weapon will set the atmosphere on fire."
I think when people say environmental issues are about our survival as a species, they overstate the case. But survival isn't all that matters; there's quality of life, too. Global warming probably has no chance to wipe us out as a species, but it certainly could - and probably will - lead to widespread famine and disease.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
What then? The companies can produce twice as much, at no real extra cost, precicely because they are more efficient.
The corporate doomsday scenario (companies going bust, trying to curb emissions) is only valid if you assume greater efficiency is impossible and that companies are doomed to produce unusable, useless pollutants in vast quantities.
There is no reason to believe this scenario. Indeed, it is a lot LESS likely than global warming! All you need to boost efficiency is a better method of production. Get more out, for a given amount in. There's a limit to how efficient you can get, but we're nowhere near that level, yet.
Added to all this - research costs money. Spending money improves the circulation and therefore the economy. Hoarding all the cash in the pockets of a hundred or so individuals does nothing for industry or the economy as a whole.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sure, why retaliate if somebody flies an airplane into a building? Every single one of the victims would've died of something anyway. The terrorists just sped it up.
I don't think that the earth cares one way or the other.
Even if the earth did, there are probably plenty of planets just like earth. The universe won't care.
On the other hand, we live here. I don't believe we have "a responsibility to take care of the earth" or whatever, and the extinction of the human race isn't a big deal in the cosmic sense, but exactly why shouldn't we try to survive?
Oh, wait. All those things came about by government regulation, despite the huge fuss that private industry kicked up about it, and despite all the right-wing gloommongers predicting instant economic meltdown if we outlawed pea-soupers. And in fact they'd be impossible to get any other way, by the basic, Economics 101 argument of the Tragedy of the Commons. Isn't it remarkable how little economics people know who say that there is an "economic" solution to every problem?
Or we could simply realize that as the problem gets worse economic pressures will naturally solve the problem.
HUH? This is exactly the kind of problem where economic pressure completely fails to drive solutions to the problem.
As long as we can't partition off the world into little cubicles where folks are forced to live with the results of their own actions, problems like this will always be soemone else's fault. Economic pressure will continue to push people in the direction of letting the atomosphere deal with the filth that they produce (at $0/per ton, it's hard to beat!)
Social or Political pressure may force a change, but economic pressure will always favor individuals making maximum use of shared resources regardlees of the cumulative effect.
"All while Bush is the only president to ever provide funding for alternative fuel sources. "
Really? Didn't Carter provide funding for alternative energy? He was the one who put in the alternative energy tax credit.
Do you have a link to a non right wing source that backs up your statement that bush is the ONLY president to provide funding for alternative energy.
"Or we could simply realize that as the problem gets worse economic pressures will naturally solve the problem."
Or maybe it won't. You have no guarantee of that.
The problem is that the price of natural resources fluctuates according to extraction and not total volume. For example if we increase logging in all national forests the price of wood will go down because the supply will increase. The supply is not increasing because there are more trees in the world it's increasing because they are being cut faster.
In our current scenario we will see the rate of extraction continue at current levels until there is no more and then the market will crash. In other words rationing will not be made in a sane and gradual manner it will come abruptly when we run out.
Finally the atmosphere may go out of whack way before we run out of any fuel. I don't think that it will happen gradually either.
evil is as evil does
Has the average temperature on Earth been going up recently? Yes. Is it due to human activity? Maybe. Can we do anything to stop it? Perhaps. Is the planet likely to go to hell within any of our lifetimes? Probably not.
But I don't care about that. I'm in favor of efforts to reduce noxious emissions for an entirely different reason - my health. Sure, the EPA has some restrictions on what kind of crap you can spew into the air, but the air in and around most US cities is nasty! It's easy not to notice if you spend all of your time in the city, but whenever I go for a long bike ride, where I need to get a lot of oxygen into my lungs, I can really tell that the air near big cities is harder to breathe. And believe me, it's no fun to be finishing a hard bike ride, taking in deep lungs-full of air, and finding yourself stuck behind a bus spewing out black soot.
I've seen plenty of posts already arguing that we shouldn't bear the burden of reducing emisisons for a dubious long-term gain. But I don't think anyone would disagree that doing so would clean up the air around us in the short-term, and that alone, to me, is worth the cost.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
Wow, economic wishful thinking... unfortunately this is not the way it works. By the time market pressure will be strong enough to push a major change in the motoring industry, a lot of damage will already have been done. It is always more expensive and difficult to de-polluate than to change our consumption habits. You need real political initiative if you want to boost alternative energy.
On the other side, I don't know what's wrong with Americans, but it seems like they always think that Kyoto is an international evil plot to crush their economy. The fact is, even if some of you can doubt the evidences of global warning presented by many indepedent and credible scientists, you still have to admit that reducing air pollution will necessarily benefit Earth's population (reducing asthma and other breathing disease, improving air quality, etc.). The problem is that USA actually has the highest emission rate per capita. Considering that, I think that you are accountable to the rest of the world for polluting the air (there's still no borders for air...). When you talk about pollution, you need to think globally.
The rhetoric used by Bush is also ridiculous (saying that the Kyoto protocol will heavily damage USA's economy). Germany has ecological laws that actually created new jobs and they have already almost reached their Kyoto's objectives. When you develop a new sector, you create new jobs. It's true that you will lose jobs in the "old" sector, but manpower will be reallocated to the new ressources. Every good economist should know that.
It is also true that oil reserve won't be everlasting. Hence, they need to be preserved for more important use than "burning" them. The US government has the moral (toward its population and the rest of the world) and economical (to diversify its economy and reduce its dependence toward oil-producing country) motivation to ratify the Kyoto engagement.
What non-scientists sometimes don't understand is that global warning is correlated to human activity above and beyond any natural cycles of the earth. There is some small chance that that correlation is a fluke, a statistical aberration, but statistics is a another very concrete science which is well used by good scientists. And these statistics give very strict confidence limits on the statements made by scientists; generally these confidence limits hover around 5%, 1% or 0.1%. So yes, there is at worst a 5% chance that the correlation between human activity and global climate change is due to natural cycles, but that leaves a 95% chance that it is US who are changing things.
Take a stats course, then take a geology course. Inform yourself and then consider the evidence for yourself. Don't simply take for granted that an oil funded think tank with a political agenda is going to present unbiased evidence.
Good luck earth.
The better term is "Climate Change," which nullifies all the snide remarks about snowstorms and such. It was called "Global Warming" when less was known about it, though the majority of the media still refer to it that way. Most models show that some parts of the planet will get colder (such as northern Europe if the Gulf Stream is curtailed due to ocean salinity). Also, the energy in the atmosphere will increase, causing more violent storms. Witness the hurricane that hit Brazil earlier this year, where those kind of storms have never been before.
:-). We can only infer from historical patterns and climate modeling, which the critics (and vested interests) attack and attack and attack while continuing to buy those SUVs and live in places with incredible energy requirements just to stay comfortable (e.g. Phoenix, Las Vegas). Remeber also that there are two kinds of skeptics, those who are open to new information and willing to be convinced, and those who will never be convinced (for many reasons) and will just nitpick arguments to death.
Unfortunatly, there really isn't any "conclusive data". We need to build a second Earth so we can use it for experiments
The main thing that would happen (according to most models) is that weather patters will change. Areas that are currently fertile and produce much of the world's food supply could suddenly (within decades) stop producing.
Even the US Department of Defence feels that this is the biggest threat that the U.S. faces in the mid-to-long term.
I'm not saying every car should be scrapped (though you'll have a hard time justifying that SUV to me), but that we really need to consider our actions now.
It just seems to me the conserv(e)ative thing to do would be not make dratic changes in the environment, and also to understand that the supply of fossil fuels is finite, and work to preserve our standard of living for future generations.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Aargh. Scientists are funded by government. In the US, both houses of congress and the executive branch are run by people, hmm, how to put this mildly, disinclined to regulating energy.
If climate researchers were purely concerned with funding, then American science would be contrary to the science of other countries with goernments more inclined to strong regulation. Fortunately for science, this isn't the case, and for the most part, US science is in the same ballpark as other countries'.
This particular dog has been hunting way too long by now. It's just incredibly irritating to see how it keeps getting sent out all the time.
If I knew where my bread was buttered I'd just shut up, frankly. That's bad enough.
What's worse is having to have such altruism as I can muster painted as opportunism. Bah! I may be wrong, but I'm not doing all this squawking for the money!
Of all the global-warming-is-bunk propaganda ploys out there, (and they're all getting wheeled out today, it seems) this is the one that most effectively and reliably makes me just furious. I can't believe people are still buying it. You can't imagine how obnoxious it is.
As usual, for the real scoop see the IPCC Scientific Working Group Report please and thank you.
mt
This is the point that I fear a lot of people miss about "environmentalism." It's not about prohibiting people from doing stuff, it's about not destroying the place where we live. Too often, I think problems get framed like "we want to drain this swamp to build a golf course for the people, but all these silly environmental regulations stopped us" when in reality, the swamp feeds an ecosystem that coincidentally sucks up excess water that would otherwise flood the surrounding areas.
I'll go out on a limb and say most environmentalists will admit they don't know the consequences of what we're currently doing, which makes conserving (the root of "conservative," by the way) what we have all the more important.
Global Warming. We will warm up the earth and either melt or be drowned. US government, consistent with the IPCC.
Climate Change. The earth will have rapidly chaging temperatures resulting in the destruction of humankind. The IPCC consensus document, very badly misrepresented.
"Run out of oxygen" theory. We'll ruin the atmosphere to the point we can't breathe it. Totally irrelevant, surface ozone site, very badly misrepresented.
Nothing. All of the above are bunk. A technical paper about middle atmosphere temperatures. Important enough within the field, but not broad enough to merit that summary.
"Various scientists publicizing all possible viewpoints" is a consequence of the importance of the issue. People who don't much care for the scientific mainstream's conclusions will dig up some iconoclasts. Research is about stuff that is uncertain, after all. The stuff that makes it into undergrad textbooks is pretty much settled, but that isn't what scientists think about.
What gets publicized isn;t the same as what people in the discipline think about. The IPCC position is the best representation of the scientific mainstream in this matter. That doesn't guarantee it's right, of course. Science is not infallible. On the other hand, it's a better bet than the various fringe positions you will see here and there. I could find you a better sampling of those than you found, but I'd rather not.
mt
Mass transit is a joke because people have redesigned the world around the increased convenience of cars. The downtown area in my town, within walking distance of most homes in town, is dying. Meanwhile, 5 giant malls have been built, none of which can be reached except by car.
Maybe $5/gallon gas or $5000/year luxury tax on cars would have some effect on this. The people who use cars the most should be paying more for the privilege instead of paying for roads out of the general tax revenue.
Saying that they use statistics and the scientist actually doing this are two separate entities.
As well if they do actually use math you should know I could say I did a statistical test and got my data to have a 1% confidence that this phenomenon is caused by humans but that still doesn't mean that my model was correct.
The problem which you easily skimmed over is that Ecologist, Geophysicist, and etc. do not have an accurate model. They are using very limited data sets and claming that it is a prediction of the earth's weather pattern. As you well know if you have finite and small data points for what could be a rather large cycle, large data, you CANNOT make a claim such as what is being touted. Simple put little data does not equal good data and without good data statistics means nothing.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Exactly.
The problem is that people think that punishing people for riding cars will make them ride mass transit more. Or that making transit better will make people magically decide to ride it.
It needs to be a coordinated effort to make mass transit more usefull, start designing cities around pedestrian traffic (but with accessible perimiter or "back street" parking for people that do live in outlying areas.
Make it easy for me to drive into the area, ditch the car, and then walk/ride to where I need to. I'd love to be able to take transit instead of my 45 minute commute, but I live up in the hills/mtns above Silicone Valley, and it's not feasible. However, I wouldn't mind a 25-30 minute drive down out of the hills, and then hop on a rail line into San Jose. Especially if it offered wireless ethernet, and had a coffee shop near the station.
The BART is great around the Bay Area, at least, where it goes... It's great, but it's not well integrated into the SF transit system, and it really needs to extend down into South Bay, but I haven't taken CalTrain up to the BART spur by the SF airport since they put it in. Too hard to get to CalTrain. Easier to just drive into SF via the mountain highways.
I am not a tree hugging hippy, i believe in being environmentally responsible. so lets look at the whole thing from another perspective
1) the amount of people with severe allergies and as-ma is increasing exponentially.
2) SUV's use 10 times more resources and create 3 times more waste that normal cars (both manufacturing use and disposal).
3) more Americans buy SUV's as a status symbol than any other country.
4) people who buy SUV's don't need SUV's
5) technology exists and is in mass production that can
a) make cars that get 60+ MPG,b) are safer and use less natural resources in their production.
as long as people drive SUV's around we are fucked. because the SUV points to a general opinion that i don't care what happens in the future i want to look good now.
what we need to do is outlaw any car that way-es over 1 ton and gets less then 60 MPG and our economic and political world will be a much better place.