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."

Comments

Global Warming?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the ice is going to melt...it'll make for some nice beachfront property in Wisconsin!

Re:Global Warming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could simply realize that as the problem gets worse economic pressures will naturally solve the problem.

Yeah, just like "economic pressures" delivered clean air, and fresh water, and clean food.

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?

Re:Global Warming?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Global Warming?

[killjoe]

"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.

Re:Global Warming?

[AKAImBatman]

Wow, I'm pro-nuclear power, but not like that :)

Ford was worse. At one point, they wanted to put a nuclear reactor into a car! :-)

Whats the energy density of rice?

Pathetic. About 15 MJ/kg. And it's pretty hard to come up with kilograms of rice or corn when compared to other fuels.

It always amazing me how little food we animals need to eat to continue functioning and moving around.

Well, your body is generating about 200 watts of constant power. That means that you need about .72 MJ per hour to operate. For cars, you tend to need a lot more horsepower. Here's the conversion:

1 Watt = 0.00134102209 horsepower

For a 150HP engine, you're talking about an energy drain of about 112 KW. That's 403 MJ of energy per hour. Realistically, cars only expend a lot of energy when accelerating. Thus an economy car tends to use more like 20 HP for cruising. That works out to a constant power requirement of about 15 KW. 15KW is 5.4 MJ per hour.

Re:Global Warming?

[Whygee]

"Or we could simply realize that as the problem gets worse economic pressures will naturally solve the problem."

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.

George Carlins take

[DrugCheese]

Fuck the next generation, I'm cold now!

To be honest...

[robslimo]

I'll have to be a global warming agnostic. I've seen credible viewpoints that indicate that in the next decades we will either be swimming like "Water World" or freezing in a new ice age.

I just get the feeling that our science into yet up to the task of interpreting our climate.

Re:To be honest...

[WOV]

More likely, you've been hearing the same forecasts, and not paying enough attention to the timeframe. Many simulations show that a period of swimming like "Water World" increases the Earth's albdeo sufficiently that it *induces* a new ice age - several decades later. We're not that good at simulating something as complex as the climate out more than a few years. However, please realize that we *are* very good at measuring CO2 and its impact on the atmosphere, and that marginal scientists aside, no other variable - sunspots, orbital precession, yadda, yadda, has changed nearly enough - or in as obviously correlated a fashion - as atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Just because there's still a very very small number of scientists out there who question it does not really mean there's a "difference of opinion in the science community."

flooding

[wankledot]

Maybe someone who knows what they're talking about can answer this question I have about melting ice and flooding.

Since so much of ice sits underwater, and water expands when frozen, wouldn't it make sense that melting icebergs would actually shrink the oceans, or at least keep them the same size? I know there's a lot of ice on top of land masses melting as well, but what about all the ice in the water?

Am I an idiot for thinking this way?

Re:flooding

[Paulrothrock]

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

Capitalism & Population Growth

[KrackHouse]

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.

Best to Worst is large!

[RobertB-DC]

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.

Re:I don't buy it

[Kenja]

Thats the same site that claims recycling is a waste of time and caffine isn't adictive. Take it all with a grain of salt.

A really elaborate advertisement?

[192939495969798999]

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.

To all Global Climate Change Doubters

[Paulrothrock]

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.

Global warming not our fault?

[gorzek]

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.

Re:Global warming not our fault?

[misterpies]

>>Thinking humans can make or break it is arrogant and egotistical, to say the least.

And assuming that humans can't is what, exactly? Global warming is not a scare story made up by environmentalists, you know. It's the leading scientific theory of how the climate currently behaves. Surely the least arrogant and egotistical way of looking at things is to build a model based or our best understanding of how the climate works, and see the effect of adding CO2? (answer: global warming) Maybe the models are wrong - but I'd put my faith in them over 'elementary school biology' (or do you have the calculations to back up your claim).

Climatologists are aware that plants absorb CO2. They're also aware that most ecosystems are carbon-neutral (because when the plant/plankton dies, it decays). Unless you have plans to increas the planet's green cover, this will have little effect. Of course, increased desertification - a probable result of warming - would have the opposite effect. They're also aware that warming threatens to release masses of greenhouse gasses trapped under permafrost in Siberia, which would accelerate the effect. They're also aware that the earth went through a little ice-age recently. It's not disputed that the earth is going through a naturally warming phase. But the rate of warming is much faster than predicted because of that alone - and fits in well with predictions based on CO2 emissions.

The fact is that recent climate models, based on our best understanding of the science, do a pretty good job of explaining the earth's climate over the past century, and they indicate that CO2 plays a major role in recent warming, and that without a reduction in CO2 levels, warming will increase. I, for one, am happy to follow the scientific evidence.

If Microsoft issued those articles . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . 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?

Re:Um.....

[Ilan Volow]

But if we did that, the polar icecaps wouldn't melt, and then we'd never be able to visit the Lost City of Atlanta.

Perhaps they should think before they build

[RhettLivingston]

This isn't a global warming problem though it is another effect of the root problem. The root problem in the Western world is our short sightedness. If buildings were built to last a few hundred years instead of a few decades, they would probably think more seriously about building in a 500 or 1000 year flood plain.

In any case, 20 billion pounds a year is meaningless in relation to the infrastructure cost of avoiding global warming without changing lifestyles (good luck if you think you can change lifestyles in any direction other than towards increased decadence). So, this study, even if taken seriously, still does not demonstrate the cost effectiveness of avoiding global warming. Until a solution to global warming is identified that is provably cheaper in the short term than our short term economic losses demonstrably caused by global warming, it won't fly. Jumping up and down and screaming about fears for the possible future won't change that fact, especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future.

Re:I don't buy it

[madfgurtbn]

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.

Re:I don't buy it

[WoodenRobot]

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?

I really hope that as a species we're capable of fucking up the world better than farting cows....

Re:I don't buy it

[IceAgeComing]

You're not alone, but the size of your camp is dwindling with the growing evidence of the greenhouse effect.

Scientists today:

* know pretty accurately the size of our atmosphere
* know pretty accurately what's in it
* have run controlled experiments showing how much heat is trapped by CO2 and other gasses
* know roughly how much CO2 is being added daily.

Here's what looks like a pretty balanced overview, gleaned through google of course:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_ wa rming/page.cfm?pageID=515#Overview

I can respond to one of your points: it's not necessarily that the earth has never seen the greenhouse effect before, but the rate of its onset may very well be a new phenomenon. There have been massive volcanic eruptions in recent history, such as Krakatoa, but I believe we are producing more CO2 than anything like this.
If the Earth warms up quicker than most species have ever experienced, there is no reason to believe that there wouldn't be massive species upheaval.

Re:I don't buy it

[mikerich]

You know what - it's really not popular, but I don't agree with the doomsday global warming scenarios either. There's a couple of reasons: 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.

Already factored into the climate models. The Earth should by now be dipping back towards a glacial episode. Warming since the mid 20th Century appears to be man made.

Additionally, the rate of climate change is almost entirely unprecedented. Whilst global temperatures are not high on the geological timescale they are rising at an extraordinary rate which appears to lack a natural cause.

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?

In short - no. During the Mesozoic both poles were covered by ocean, water could move freely through the oceans, heat was effectively distributed round the globe. Overall temperatures were higher. Since then, Antarctica has slipped over the South Pole and the North Pole is now almost entirely enclosed by land. Oceanic circulation is much more dynamic with cold water forming at the poles and descending to the floor of the oceans - which are only just about freezing point. The warming of these cold waters in the tropics is what holds the temperature way below Mesozoic levels.

3. Isn't is just a little bit arrogant on the part of humanity to assume that we really affect the environment that much?

Not really, we seem to have done a wonderful job devastating the ecologies of places such as Iceland (once had forests), the seasonally dry areas around the deserts which were once productive grasslands and are now deserts, the salinisation of the Middle East and Pakistan thanks to faulty irrigation, we've buggered the Aral Sea beyond recognition, we're busy knackering the Mekong River with badly-thought through hydropower projects, the Colorado only occasionally reaches the sea, god only knows what we've done by carrying rats and cats around the World to places where they were previously unknown. And so on. So actually, no, it would be amazing if we WEREN'T screwing up the atmosphere.

What about bovine methane?

Methane was estimated to produce about 20% of global warming in the 1990s. Its sources are many - melting permafrost, natural gas leaks, swamps are some of the natural ones. However we contribute to it by things such as rice paddies and those huge herds of cattle which just aren't natural.

What about a single volcanic eruption spewing more CFC's then we've ever thought about using?

Errr volcanoes don't spew CFCs. They release carbon dioxide which is a global warming agent, but they also pour out ash, sulphuric acid and hydrogen chloride which serve to depress temperatures.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:What if ...

[another_henry]

Any water taken from polar ice is effectively melted. This is because it isn't "used up" as such unless you electrolyse it or something - it will sooner or later (probably sooner) find its way back to the sea via rivers or groundwater. Because all the seas are connected the end result will be the sealevel rising just as much as if it had been melted directly from the icecap.

Of course you have to keep in mind that (and I'm pretty sure about this, not certain though, it's hard to wrap your head around) ice from the north pole displaces just as much water when it's ice as when it's water - because it's floating, melting that shouldn't change the level. However melting or mining ice from the south pole will cause the sea level to rise, because it's on land at the moment.

Hope that made some kind of sense, and if I'm wrong about any of it please correct me!

Long-term, schlong-term, I want clean air NOW!

[Thurn und Taxis]

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.

Re:I don't buy it

[TakenName]

The problems pop up when peaple[sic] try to show some type of "link"...THAT is psuedo-science.

No, phrenology, astrology and creationism are pseudo science. Ecology, Oceanography and Geophysics are real physical science, firmly rooted in experimentation and more importantly statistics.

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.

Re:I don't buy it

[admiralh]

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.

Unfortunatly, there really isn't any "conclusive data". We need to build a second Earth so we can use it for experiments :-). 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.

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.

AAAARGH!

[uncadonna]

The scientists have to stoke fear in order to get funding from governments. If we had scientists more concerned with creating viable solutions to the "problems" of global warming they would be more interested in practical solutions that people would want instead of screaming about doom & gloom to get another grant.

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.

Re:What if ...

[Saige]

What, you mean only the ice over water on the North Pole will melt, and the ice over land such as Antarctica, Greenland, Canada, Russia, and such will still stay ice for some reason? Or does any water melting from that ice somehow not alter the sea level?

If it seems that easy to undermine such a concept being presented by a number of scientists, then you may want to reconsider whether you're taking everything into account.

Re:I don't buy it

[monkeyfamily]

I bet cattle would fart less if we didn't force-feed quite so much them before we killed 'em. And the methane they spew is only a tiny part of the pollution they cause. Ammonia gas, phosphorous, and lotsa microbes and pathogens stream out of every feedlot in enormous quantities.
"For every 10 pounds of nutrients consumed, 8 to 9 pounds are excreted in the feces and urine."
Straight from the USDA.
Does this strike you as wasteful? Did you know the US could feed 800,000,000 people on the grain that's fed to livestock? Let the cows eat grass and save the grain for the starving! Or sell it and take $80 billion off the trade deficit!
Fucking decadent carnivores, messing up the place...