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New Climate Change Warning
sebFlyte writes "A new grid computing climate research project, climateprediction.net, has come up with its first major results, and they're really not good news for the planet according to the BBC. The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought."
Kelvin and Celsius degrees are actually the same amount. The point at which they start is the only difference. One is absolute zero and the other is the freezing point of water. So the change will be 11C.
RTFA. It says ranging from 2 degrees Celsius, up to 11 degrees. I guess it doesn't help when the original submitter is an idiot and can't even get the facts straight. Incompetency on Slashdot. Sigh.
None of this is going to be relevant a hundred years from now.
There are some theories that we don't have even 20 years, let alone 100.
There is no degrees Kelvin. It's just 11 Kelvin. And it sounds more sciencey. Even though 11K = 11 degrees C.
Hmm, an interesting review was posted on Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110815
Not so good. I've had some issues with Chrichton and his reactionary, conservative stance before. This could help you take some of it with a grain of salt.
Or not, I don't propose to be an expert. Just thought it might interest you.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
11K = 11 degrees C
wrong.. 11K is not 11 degrees C. 11K is -262 degrees C. What I think you meant to say is that a difference of 11K is equal to a difference of 11 degrees C.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Just to clarify for all you US Customary unit folks; a temperature change of 1K is equal to a temperature change of 1C. The only difference between the two scales is the zero point. Celsius uses the freezing point of water, Kelvin uses absolute zero. The original submitter was absolutely correct.
Its not the humans getting too hot thats going to be the problem.
Many fish in the Pacific ocean hatch out of eggs on the great barrier reef. That reef's eco system is tired into specific temperature bands and certain fish breed in specific parts of it. There is a very delicate balance in the food chain that does go away with slight changes. The last 10 years has seen a major drop in the number of young fish that hatch and that means there are fewer fish in the ocean to feed humans.
Also don't forget water. If you increase a forest's temperature by about 5 degrees, you double its risk of forest fire. If the risk is high enough you end up with a former forest that can't recover after fires. Forest hold a massive amount of water and are a major part of the local water cycle.
The areas you mentioned can only support that many people because of good transportation and the fact there is a huge river to pump water from. The great salt lake is getting much smaller very quickly and its local evaporation and local rain is a source of a great deal of the ground water. That local water cycle provides a buffer that helps keep the climate bearable.
The climates models are computed using the BOINC platform (distributed computing in your PC, similar to SETI, etc.).
Please, help the project donating your idle CPU cycles, go to: the homesite of the project and download the client.
The client (BOINC) supports Linux, Windows, MAC OS, etc.
Why does this site consistently have to be filled with dweeby little pricks falling all over themselves to ridicule someone for a mistake?
Fortunately for the OP, he was right and you're the idiot in this case since a *differential* in Kelvin is equivalent to a differential in Celcius.
And for the other SI units geniuses that stepped up, small "k" is the prefix for kilo, not large K, which is the exclusive domain of Kelvin.
Damn, at least be right when insulting someone, dumbasses.
yes but on average, calculating temperature for the world, the change hasn't even been significant enough to go up by 1 degree F for the last 15,000 years. When we speak of ice ages, small ones can be -5F, and the biggest and largest -10F. WHat they're saying is that the earth might heat up as much as +10 F! Thats the equivalent of an ice age in the other way - it will get very hot. The big problem with that is the vegetion will be killed off - mass hunger will plague nations. Even a small change in global warming can affect crops, in fact, it already has negatively affected every crop other than in the state of Washington and Oregon, where there was more rain...
1) Yes. Most of the land between the Mississippi and the rockies (you know, that flat, empty place most of your food comes from?) is one good drought from becoming a desert as it is. An 11 degree rise in average temperatures isn't going to help that.
2) Maybe. Maybe not. The more important question is "can it be stopped by humans?".
3) Importing all our grain from Russia and Canada is likely to be a little expensive. How much is it worth to avoid that?
4) Responsible use of resources?
The equations are tweaked, within reasonable boundaries, so that the model does as well as possible at producing past and current climates (compared to archived observations).
I really can't beleave you give them so little credit as to think they would overlook something so bleading obvious as to test the model before using it. Do you discount everyone you disagree with this easily.
The problem is that even 2 degrees would cause billions, if not trillions of dollars in damage to low lying costal areas where the vast majority of the world's population lives. Of course Bush II thinks the problem needs to be studied for another 5 or 10 years, because who knows? If you do enough studies, one of them may crank out a result that you like.
A recent study suggests that global warming might have saved us from the next ice age.
The model involved in this research was tweaked to reproduce the climate data for the last 50 years. I do make the presumption that if the model can do so with reasonable accuracy that it can predict the future with reasonable accuracy.
The upcoming energy crisis will help reduce some of our harmful emissions.
And guess what? We killed ten of thousands ourselves "liberating" them, and now the civilian death rate is worse than it was under Saddam.
You mean like the Iraqi teenager who was seen in Abu Ghraib, lying on the floor with his anus bleeding while US troops discussed sodomizing him with metal objects? I guess that story didn't get reported on FOX News, huh?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If all the ice on Antarctica and Greenland melted, global sea level would rise about 80 metres. There is 30 million km3 of water in Antarctic ice.
The ice is miles deep on Antarctica.
It would have to get pretty damned hot to melt all that though.
It seems neither you nor the person(s) who modded you up didn't know that the researchers actually used the method you proposed to select the best models. The AFP story on Yahoo, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=15 12&e=6&u=/afp/scienceenvironment/, states that "Once the first batch of results was obtained, the researchers selected those models that had simulated the past climate accurately.
These best-performing models were then asked to predict how much the Earth would warm after CO2 concentrations had doubled from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm)."
Sing it with me... "And the men who hold high places, must be the ones who start.. to mold a new reality.. closer to the heart."
Or, Perhaps...
AF2K.com (A Farewell To Kings), my Hypernovel, the kernel of which was written in 1990, before I knew what a distirbuted grid was, addresses this issue and quotes Rush along the way. In the novel, the simulation, SYnergistic Resource for INformation eXchange (SYRINX
Oddly, the 11 years to go from 378ppm to a "dangerous level" of 400ppm at 2ppm per year is 2015! Lucky guess? You decide...
What makes this post 'on-topic' is this quote from the article:
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
When one thinks about how to remedy the situation, you often end up with such resistance that the will to make it so causes "political change". That went to an extreme in the novel, trust me. The key was three-fold:
- Michael Gavon made then think
- Marena San Leoni made them feel
- Adrienne made them get off their a55s and do something
Perhaps we need to adopt this model as well. "Knowing the answer isn't all there is... you have to get someone to listen to you. And to make someone listen to what they don't want to hear, takes a gift..."starglider29a
author, A Farewell to Kings
http://www.af2k.com
The british often use Fahrenheit as well, and always use it when talking about the weather, except for the forecasters, who mix everybody up by using Centigrade. Some pedants in Britain also correct you use the term Centigrade, because they reckon it should be Celcius, but Centigrade was taught for years in schools, and nobody uses Celcius except for a few boffins. Also, only boffins use Kelvin, which is odd because it is named after a British scientist, (Lord Kelvin). The British generally use imperial measures (inch/foot/yard/pint/pound/stone/mile/gallon/furlo ng(!)) interchangeably with metric (or SI) units, so there is a generally air of confusion about the exact size of things in the UK. Multiple trips back to the hardware store are required to get the part you need.
The government has tried for years to make a conversion, but it has resulted in a kind of permanent half-way house situation. I believe the same thing is happening in Canada.
There was a case a few years back when a probe to mars hit the surface at 10 thousand miles an hour because of a units mix up between british and american boffins!
I stole this
I suppose out of "principle" we should have left Afgahanistan in the shit-hole state it was in under theocratic islamic rule by the Taliban. Am I right?
The US was, in large part, responsible for fostering Islamic fundamentalism and creating that shit-hole state in the first place.
Despite that, the world actually was supporting the US in its action in Afghanistan. Iraq is the big problem, where the US has outright lied in order to justify its military action.
Afghanistan was a total sucess. They have freedom and democrocy now.
You are so naive. Afghanistan is probably better off than it used to be under the Taliban, but it will take decades before it has any semblance of "freedom and democracy", and that is only if nothing else goes wrong.
Isn't there a theory that global warming will melt loads of ice which decreases the saltiness of the ocean around the artic and this will disturbe the gulf stream leading to cooling of varies parts of the world, IIRC Europe and the east coast of the US. Could have been warped version of that.
These results were collated from approx. 60,000 separate climate model runs. Here's a link to the actual paper published in Nature (PDF). ClimatePrediction.net passed the 50,000 run mark only a month ago, so it looks like participation is on the up. Kudos to everyone running it! Personally I've switched from SETI@Home to this project. (Of course, you may feel that cancer research into protein folding is more important. One of the nice things about the BOINC framework is that you can contribute to multiple projects at the same time.)
The 'eleven degrees rise over the next century' is of course the worst-case scenario. Of course, climate disruptions of that magnitude really would be catastrophic to human civilisation - for one thing, massive loss of agricultural production, the loss of large areas of expensive real-estate (many of the world's great cities would certainly be under water. I don't know precisely what magnitude of sea level rise 11 degrees would produce but consider that the Greenland ice sheet, which is already showing signs of increased melting, would produce approx. 7m rise - that's goodbye to London and New York and Amsterdam for starters.) Here's a chart from the IPCC's 2001 report showing the various scenarios they based their predictions on. As you can see, the worst-case they foresaw was about 5 or 6 degrees C. The significant thing about these results is that the upper bound of the range of possible temperature rises is shown to be about twice as severe as previously thought. Not only is more and more solid evidence being produced to back the fundamental prediction that human CO2 emissions are causing significant changes in our climate, but the magnitude of those predicted changes is getting greater and greater as time goes on. Note as well that the charts don't suddenly flatline at the year 2100...
Finally I'm looking forward to a discussion on RealClimate.org on this. I've found it to be utterly addictive to see discussions amongst actual researchers in the field, not only showing the areas of legitimate disagreement, debate and uncertainty, but also the solidity of the scientific consensus, as well as busting various common myths - the Crichton garbage, the hockey-stick stuff etc etc. Strongly recommended.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"The original poster was fine, though why they converted TFA's Celcius into Kelvin, I'm not sure."
It's better to use K, because you can't perform calculations on the Celsius scale. For example, 20 C + 30 C != 50 C. It is in fact well over 300 C.
20 C + 30 K = 50 C, however.
My Sig: SEGV
Is not capitalized. You'd have a point if it was "11k".
FRA: STFU GTFO
There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.
2 0dioxide/CO2.html and http://www.mindfully.org/Air/CO2-US2000-DOE.htm US CO2 production is about 1.3 to 1.5 Billion tons each year. Given that the US produces about %25 of CO2, that means that Global CO2 production is at most 6 Billion tons or about 55 times as much as volcanic eruptions. Hardly anywhere near the 10,000 number you and they throw out.
If the above were completely true, humans would produce about 1 TRILLION tons of C02 each year. according to http://www2.biotech.wisc.edu/jeffries/faq/carbon%
Using the USGS All of humanity produces 22 Billion a year and volcanoes 130-220, that is 100-170 times the volcanoes, still much less than 10,000.
Now for large volcanic explosions such as Mt. Saint Helens and, Krakatoa? Still trying to find info on them, but has to be much more than their average.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
My most serious problem with this well spoken article is, is that it concentrates to much on enviromentalisms and misunderstands the size of each of the factors. Forinstance volcanoes and forest fires do not dwarf human emissions, it's the other way around actually. I think these myths came into being, cause over one day a volcano can outstrip human emissions sometimes, but it totally forgets humans keep outputting year round and volcanoes don't. You can clearly see this from the background CO2 level starting to near double from its normal levels over the last century and a half.
This doesn't mean we should start panicking right now considering that there are ofcourse still considerable problems with creating good models of climate change, just like with weather predictions there are alot of unknown variables. Though you should remember the type of problem is fundamentally different. At current none of the models can without a bit of help properly predict all past climatic events, some factor forcing is required.And this likely points to us not understanding certain factors well enough yet.
Still, it concerns me that any model able to predict past changes the least bit accuratly, predicts that in our current situation there will be considerable warming. Ofcourse they could all be wrong, but it concerns me greatly none the less because I don't believe they can be totally wrong. Expecially there we also have been seeing temperature rises over the 20th century in excess of anything I've managed to find during the Ice Age period, the only one I do know of that might look like it, the PETM (Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum), had a massive temperature spike of 5-10 degrees Celsius.
It's the new Michael Crichton book, and is an action/thriller as most of his are, except it deals with a band of ecoterrorists and the people trying to thwart them. What's interesting is how many graphs, charts, and footnotes he has in there that point to the idea that global warming really isn't occuring. I just got done reading it, and it was a pretty good story. Haven't had time to look at any of the footnotes first hand yet, but seems to present a pretty strong argument. One of the big points he makes in the appendix is that all these studies are biased in some way or another, and that unless there are true double blind studies done, it will stay that way. Industry of course wants to discredit global warming, and beaurocrats want to see reports like this. It's silly to think either end is going to be totally honest.