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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."
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.
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 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.
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
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)."
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