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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."
Someday people are going to feel awfully silly that they were worrying about terrorism instead of the warning signs of ecological degeneration.
I suspect that the planet will be fine in either case. Now perhaps not good news for it inhabitants...
Disclaimer: I actually do think there's something in the global warming argument. I think putting loads more energy into a chaotic system gives that system the freedom to explore states in its phase space that could cause us some real grief. I actually don't care if "the planet will survive, it's seen worse". I'd prefer to survive personally, and I'd like to keep a few other humans around as well...
:-). I don't think that alarmist, over-the-top "reports" are doing any real good - in fact I think they harm the argument they try to represent.
However I think the results are pretty conclusive in their own right and right-minded politicians ought to be doing something on that basis alone (they're finally beginning to, as well
So, by varying the parameters in a simulation, they've found a range of temperature increases which we should engender reactions from "concerned" (2 degrees) through "terrified" (11 degrees). Hey, I admitted my bias in the first paragraph! The press reports the "terrified" figure and it's big news. Until someone points out that it's a Normal distribution, and the massively-more-likely figure is in the "worried" temperature range of (guessing here) 5-6 degrees.
The problem is not that the scientists are lying (they're not), and not that the press are lying either (they're not). The problem is a lack of understanding of the end-result in announcing a catastrophe and then saying "No, we'll be ok". There's a fable about this, and it involves a boy crying "wolf" too many times...
I'm not sure who's to blame. Should the scientists state more forcefully what their expectation is rather than the extremes of their results? Would they ever get published in that case ? Should journalists be held accountable for doing the equivalent of shouting "Fire" in a theatre ? Well, a journalist's job is not to report the news, it's to sell papers, and catastrophes sell better. Perhaps there's a need for a neutral ground, some sort of arbiter that can interpret the results in a way the public can understand (since no-one seems to take science these days), but *that*'s open to *easy* abuse as well.
Perhaps science was better off in its ivory tower after all. That's a depressing thought. Perhaps the best solution would be to comprehensively educate people about science (better, about statistics) and beat the snake-oil salesmen at their own game.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
11K? Is that 11 000 *unknown units* or 11 degrees kelvin? If 11 degrees kelvin, why not just say 11 degrees celsius...
It was sunny today.
The news was unable to predict either of these to any accuracy only 24 hours prior to the weather event.
You want to believe that they can predict the weather 100 years from now?
Out of sample results? Anything?
it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide.
Uh. Ok.
Both.
... if you think ol' Sol has a constant output, I have a bridge to sell you.
Again, why do I have to keep posting the same thing: where are the scientists?
SHOW me a graph of solar infrared output versus Earth temperatures, over a period of at least 50 years.
THEN we'll see how much B.S. this global warming crap is.
Mankind doesn't have the ability to alter the planet in this way. We're off by dozens of orders of magnitude.
Get real, folks. It's all about the sun.
Do conservatives just not think there are consequences, or does it just appear that way? "Pollute the environment? Don't worry about it. Dump motor oil on your lawn, screw it. Make a liberal cry. Hahaha. Torture innocents? Eh. Has to be done. Drive up the national debt? C'est l'vie. Declare war for no good reason? They love us for it, the liberal media lies if they say any different."
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non? The prevailing scientific opinion is that global warming is real and dangerous. Where'd these religious zealots come from, and when do we start shooting?
It's better to deal with one issue then to not deal with any issues at all.
You have to prioritize based on immediate threat.
Life is not for the lazy.
A few decades ago, it was global cooling, now they're all panicky about global warming. I wonder what it'll be next?? It's all just ridiculous scare tactics/political propoganda. The data they're citing isn't even standardized.
Don't worry people, sit tight, the sky isn't gonna fall down on us.
Actually, based on this:
The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K
I can only conclude that the average annual rise in the average global temperature* will be up to 11 degrees Kelvin for the next 100 years. In other words, the average temperature will be up to 1100 degrees warmer in 2105 than it is now.
I'm no global warming expert or pundit, but that's certainly my interpretation of the story blurb that made the front page. Good work on the clarity, Slashdot submitters and editors!
* - Saying "temperatures" in the plural is misleading, as global warming is about global average temperature, and using the plural indicates local measurements are what is relevant, which is not the case.
Make one up!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here.
Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.
We could all benefit from a few more minutes walking, a few less minutes driving, and a few less minutes using electricity each day. We all complain, let's personally do something about it.
Of course, you're forgetting the counterintuitive yet also highly likely result of global warming - an ice age.
Possibly just another one of those problems that we can deal with, but maybe not. At any rate, it debunks your argument that global warming is almost definitely a good thing.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It's about the only thing the "global warming is our fault and it's going to kill us all" morons can agree with the "if the earth is warming why do we have record snowfall for the second straight year" idiots on.
Put in the conditions for 50 years ago. Run the model forward 50 years. If the model correctly predicts the conditions today, report that. Then tell us what it predicts about the future.
Until you have a model that correctly predicts the present to a high degree of accuracy, shut up about the future..
Serious, too often ignored, questions:
1) Is it serious, i.e. causes big problems?
2) Is it caused by humans?
3) Is the cost of stopping negative effects lower than the cost of the negative effects?
4) Is there an alternative?
What is known now:
1) Who knows... worst case forecasts trumped up to guarantee continued funding for one's research projects are over-excited at best and morally bankrupt at worst.
2) Who knows... could be natural cycles or the sun.
3) Probably not...Kyoto would cost America $200-300B/yr for decades, and save little compared with money spent on research into alternative fuels or space energy mining.
4) Growth & Wealth
The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies. The third world would not only pollute less if they entered the first world, but they would also be much better prepared to handle any possible problems.
Compare the earthquakes in Iran last year to those in California. Or the system to prevent casualties from tsunamis in Japan to the non-existent system in nations recently affected.
The body count from the recent tsunamis is close to 300,000. Who are environmentalists kidding themselves to say potential global warming is a greater threat than other natural disasters, malaria, and poverty in general?
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
The quote doesn't say that the safest level of C02 to have is 0 ppm, it says that there is no way you can define a certain level as safe and unsafe. The fact that you choose to interpret the quote in the way that you did shows that you read the article with a bias against the ideas of global warming.
p
I also find it funny that you criticize the results of a very well-known study without actually seeing the results, then you proceed to ask for definitive results. Maybe you could actually visit the climateprediction.net website for more information before criticizing their research? For example, go here for a detailed description of their model: http://www.climateprediction.net/science/index.ph
The events of 9/11 certainly happened. Does that indicate that there was a significant, immediate ongoing threat?
Does it indicate that Iraq posed a significant, credible threat?
A threat so real that one thousand four hundred and eighteen (to date) American lives should be spent stopping (somehow) that threat?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Climate Change is a euphamism marketed by republicans to confuse the issue. Whichever side of the debate you are on, what we are talking about is Global Warming.
I am far more convinced that Peak Oil is going to be the next big catastrophe to hit humanity. Peak oil has far more evidence going for it in that oil supply's have followed the Hubbert's peak model in many different areas where oil has been discovered. Of course if world oil consumption falls this means that Global Warming is going to be a non-issue 100 years from now and we are either going to be somewhere in between the scenarios where we'll all be living in a nuclear powered hydrogen economy utopia where fossil fueled powered engines are as common as horse and buggy or living in poverty with 1/5 or less of the world's population due to mass starvation.
Jeeze, what does BUSH have to do with it? You can't quote a negative statistic without mentioning Bush in the same thought? How about this: 3.2 MILLION AMERICANS WERE KILLED BY CIGARETTES ON CLINTON'S WATCH!!! Makes no sense, right?
It's because millions of workers would be out of their damned jobs (assuming they weren't in jail) and ready to vote the jerks "in the government" out of office, if not start outright rebellion.
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
...Global Warming supporting scientific community have mountains of evidence...
But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity. Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time. There were times in recorded history when it was much warmer and also times when it was much colder, all long before mankind started using fossil fuels. So right now we may be in a warming cycle, the duration and extent of which NONE of the smart-@ss scientists can predict any more than the lottery numbers.
All theory is gray
Does anybody remember how Chaos Theory was first postulated?
Yes, I seem to recall reading about Henri Poincare finding a "homoclinic tangle" while trying to solve the problem of the stability of the Solar System (to win a prize put up by the King of Sweden). It amounted to a strange attractor, and a chaotic system. That probably wasn't "the first" being only around 1890, but it was one of the earlier points. Why what did you have in mind?
The crux of Chaos Theory is that some systems will NEVER be predictable because there are so many variables that it is impossible to know all the starting conditions.
Not really. Chaos Theory generally has more to say about what you can predict/say about such systems, and the fact that your predictions will have to be formed differently than those of nice classical linear systems.
Or were you talking about "Popular Chaos Theory" where people who don't know what they're talking about make vague generalisations about what they think "Chaos Theory" probably means, largely based on a few half assed descriptions from MIchael Crichton books and Hollywood films?
If a computer model can't even predict weather more than a few days out, how is it that it can predict weather a hundred years from now?
Really? I can make quite a few fairly accurate predictions about the weather over the coming year: It will be (in the northen hemisphere) warmer over June July and August, but will cold come the end of the year. On average Florida will be warmer than Maine this year. Seattle will see a lot of days with rain this year.
You see, despite it being a chaotic system, it's still possible to discuss some of the more qualitive aspects with some accuracy. I can't predict exactly what the weather will be like on July 23rd, but I can make a fairly accurate guess that it will be warmer than the weather tomorrow (unless you're in the southern hemisphere). They can't tell you exactly what the weather will be like 100 years from now, but they can make qualitive broad statements about it.
Chaos Theory has to be the single most misunderstood and misrepresented theory next to Quantum Physics. Could you please refrain from further spreading this bizarre contaminated view of what is, actually, an interesting field of mathematics.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
no offense, but no one on this site has enough knowledge or understanding to talk about this subject.
it seems like there'd be less bullshit being posted if the topic were creationsm or some bollocks like that.
"The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies"
Protection against nature? the problem isn't "nature", it's the distinctly unnatural effects of dumping billions of tons of extra carbon into the atmosphere.
The deepest irony is that right now in the US we've got a sweet deal, climate-wise, in the status quo, with our temperate climate and fertile breadbaskets. From purest self-interest, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue to perturb the system. On a geological time frame most of the time the earth has either been incredibly hot with no ice caps, or frozen in ice ages; our current temperate, interglacial state is the exception, not the rule, and while it won't last forever, we still have a huge vested interest in keeping it that way as long as possible. It's true that we really don't know how the system works, but dumping tons of carbon into the air is equivalent to blindly conducting a major climatological experiment. While it's theoretically possible that we could introduce enough "dimming" from particulate pollution to counterbalance greenhouse effects, the presence of many positive-feedback systems (melting ice sheets releasing stored CO2, forests switching from carbon sinks to carbon sources, etc) make that rather unlikely. It's like saying that the best way to good health is to drink lots of beer, lots of coffee, smoke lots of opium and lots of crystal meth because they'll all cancel each other out, instead of not doing any of them and maybe get out of the house every now and then.
This happened before with CFCs--the scientific community pointed out the harmful effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, the world acted to reduce CFCs, and it appears like we might have acted in time--the ozone holes seem to be shrinking.
Maybe we'll act in time for climate change. Or perhaps invading Iran would be a better use of our time.
No, the big scary predictions are there to scare us back onto the straight and narrow.
It's like when you tell a friend "You're drunk. If you drive home you'll kill somebody," when you know that he only has a 1 in 10 chance of actually killing somebody on that night, you still might be able to stop him and drive him home yourself, preventing a potential accident.
Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.
Having a let it ride attitude is a good way to meet with the day you really needed that gun, and didn't have one.
But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity.
There is quite a lot of evidence, or at least indicators. A simple one:
As a child, did you ever make a small ecosystem? Basically a plant sealed in a bottle. If you did not, I can tell you that increasing carbon dioxide increases temperature. And as a comparison, burning fossile fuels releases a lot of stored carbon dioxide. Now, the earth is not a closed system like the bottle, but we can suspect that the same principles apply. Get it? Or was I too smart-@ss for you?
Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time.
As I, and many others, have mentioned before on Slashdot, scientists do not dispute that climate changes over time. What they worry about is a much more rapid change than has been seen before. And before you say we don't have measurements from the past, we do. We can check trees, sediments, ice layers in the Arctic and Antarctic to see temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide.
Think of it as a pendulum slowly going back and forth. It was already going in the direction of slightly warmer, and no, it has not reached the temperature levels it has in the past. However, when we compare the speed of change, it looks like someone whacked this pendulum hard and sent it rocketing in one direction. And this at the same time that humans started releasing a lot of greenhouse gasses. How far will the pendulum go? Where will it stop? Is there something we can do about it? That is the questions being discussed.
And before the old lie of volcanoes releasing more greenhouse gasses pop up - read this. Volcanoes release more pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but NOT as much carbon dioxide. Not even close to what humans release.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Bad presumption, I'm afraid. I've explained that a bit in an earlier reply, see here.
What it boils down to is the model is only assured to be good for the range of data that you fitted it to. Plug in data that is outside that range (which you must do, if you believe that the future will be significantly different than the present!) and the model is suddenly unreliable.
Of course, I've assumed that the model isn't suffering from spurious correlation or over-fitting. In those cases, it could be wrong for the range of data you fitted it to!
See what I've been reading.
That's because Michael Crichton is a moron. Just like Dan Brown (as the other poster referred to), they are idiots who write books for other idiots.
He may be an MD, but he has to have one of the poorest grasps of science and technology of any writer I have seen. I really do wonder how he managed to pass his exams in Med School, because he seems to have none of the basic groundwork in critical thinking that is normally taught to undergraduates.
I just don't understand how anyone takes him seriously when his entire idea of chaos theory was a mathematician who went around spouting statements that any child over 10 could utter...
He's a fucking puppet for the Republicans and deserves to burn in hell with Coulter, Rand, Rove, Rice, Bush and all the other evil bastards...
Yeah, I also learned from Chrichton that Japan is a nation of sadistic, murderous and xenophobic bastards bent on world domination who will own all of America by 2005, making us minority citizens and leaving the majority of the workforce starving.
The cute kitten cartoons are just a cover. Beware.
Actually each machine runs the model with a varying set of parameters: different initial conditions, different responses to CO2 overload, etc. The idea is that nobody actually knows the values of most of these constants, so just try thousands of scenarios.
First they ran the parameter sets on known data (the 1800s); the ones that ran wild then don't model reality. The remaining ones are possible candidates, and are run using 1900s data. Then those are statistically analyzed (you can see the overlaid graphs of all the param sets on the climateprediction.net web site).
Nope, I recall measurements in Australia showing the same thing, and Antartica has been in a warming trend for the last 10,000 years (since the last ice age). You are correct, though that, as we understand it, the North Atlantic and Mediteranian suffered a far stronger period of warming 500-100 years ago (Egypt, as I recall, was significantly impacted).
The grand (or is that grand, grand) parent was concerned that the Bush administration didn't realize that the EPA was saying that the temperatures were rising AND were predicting further rises.
The problem here is a misunderstanding of what the point of disagreement is (and it's really not a right-left issue at all: I'm a liberal democrat myself, but agree with the White House on this). The difference is based, not on the question, "is it getting warmer?" That was a real and significant question in the 80s when there were doubts about the measurements being used. However, at this point we are fairly certain that temperatures have been rising for the last 100 years and have been rising more sharply for the last 50.
The question is: is this a natural warming trend, as observed 500-1000 years ago, is this human-induced or is it a combination of the two.
The most likely answer is that it's a combination, so the disagreement boils down to where you place the division of responsibility. If man is responsible for 0.00001% of the current warming trend then there's no point in worrying about it any more than we worry about tracking hurricanes. Do the math, warn the people, carry on.
If we're responsible for 50% of the current warming trend, then we should seriously re-think out interaction with the environment... and soon!
My personal belief is that, in the current climate of mud-slinging and political pressure, there is no reasonable way to determine the real answer, and so I am left with one overriding fact: for every form of influence man can exert on our world, nature routinely exerts far, far more influence. All of our factories, planes and cars pale in comparison to volcanoes, forest fires and various bilogical processes. The Sun's influence is still poorly understood. For example, what is the exact relationship between increases in solar output and evaporation? Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, knowing if evaporation is a linear, logarithmic or step function with respect to solar radiation is KEY to understanding global warming, and yet the process of evaporation is so complex that we have yet to understand it even enough to describe simple weather phenomenon, much less climactic change.
So, do we change the way we live? We should, but we didn't need a global warming debate to tell us that. We desperately need to police the most obviously damaging influences that man has on the environment. Chemical dumping kills millions every year, around the world. Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? We've been preventing forest fires the wrong way for 100 years, leading to fires that burn orders of magnitude hotter and more dangerously.
The problem I have with environmentalism is that it is mostly focused on a FEELING that humans are doing the wrong thing, and research is used as a sort of background music to the movement rather than the driving force. I want to be an environmentalist, but as long as environmentalism is defined by owl-squeezers and doom predictors I guess I'll have to just be a concerned inhabitant of planet Earth.
So I should have froze my ass off at -36 today, but thank god for the global warming it was only -25.
I honestly do not understand how anyone can doubt that humans cause climate change.
(1) Because people (including many here on /. apparently) don't think for themselves and easily believe the (politically and economically based) propaganda claiming otherwise.
(2) People simply don't like being told that their current lifestyles are unsustainable and that they'll have to make changes if we are to survive (i.e. they just don't like hearing that there is something "wrong" with the way they are living, so they'd rather just bury their head in the sand). I mean, nobody likes hearing that there is something wrong with something they rather like, and have grown accustomed to, doing.
(3) The problem "feels" too big to solve, essentially insurmountable, so many people feel helpless so they'd rather just deny there is a problem (again, head-in-the-sand syndrome), it feels more comforting that way, and ...
... (4) many people prefer to believe a comforting falsehood than a discomforting truth.
(5) Peer pressure (which is for adults as much as it is for teens). Certain opinions, even though they're wrong, are "cool" to have, purely by virtue of most of your peer group having them. If everyone else at school or at work acts like it's cool to blew out blatantly false statements like "volcanoes generate more greenhouse gasses than mankind's activities" or to reject pro-sustainability advocates as "tree-hugging hippies", then it becomes "cool" to do that, so if you want to be cool and not be uncool you say the same things.
(6) Group-think/sheeple etc. Most people don't behave based on rational thought and analysis of problems, rather they simply imitate what other people do. So if other people laugh and say "damn bunny-hugging liberals screaming chick little", then they imitate that behaviour, regardless of how immensely stupid it might be to ignore a massive climate change problem, because that seems like more "fun" behaviour.
(7) Combining (2) and (5), nobody likes a "party pooper", i.e. nobody likes the guy that points out the problem with what you're doing. So many otherwise rational, intelligent people don't pipe up and criticise stupid behaviour .. they just watch quietly, not wanting to be the "party pooper".
(8) Another reason people prefer to ignore the problem is that humans are generally evolved for short-term thinking. Only a tiny percentage of the population can think further into the future, so for more people it all just seems way too far in the future to really be something to worry about.
Of course, all these things are so dumb and trivial compared to the problem we're facing.
Flooding out most habital areas near sea shores, massive flooding in river basins, combined with widespread drought in most other places seems like a fairly corrective measure on nature's part to me.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Believe what you want about global warming, it is hard to respect an article on climate change that begins by concluding there is "no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide."
While you're informing us US Customary unit folks, you might go ahead and remind us that 1 degree C or K is about 1.8 degrees F. So, we're looking at average temperatures up to twenty Fahrenheit degrees warmer, about the difference between "I might need a jacket" and "man, it's hot today."
THIS... this right here, is what I was talking about above. No one with a shred of scientific credentials that I've read anywhere has suggested that man has the unbridled power to reverse or even halt global warming. It's unthinkable that we would have that kind of power. All that has been suggested is that the existing warming trend, that current models take as a given could be returned to the track that our current understanding of solar and geothermal forces predict. In plain english: the best we could do is go back to slower warming, not prevent what appears to be a natural period of global warming that began in the late 1800s.
But that's not a valid statement for an environmentalist to make. It *feels* better to say that we could "stop [...] or decrease" global warming, and so science be damned!
Like I said, in this climate, we are almost certain to be unable to extract real meaning from the data at our disposal. Instead, I suggest that we focus on the threats to the environment that are real, provable, and KILLING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR. Do that, and you are a real environmentalist. Do that as an environmentalist organization, and I will back you financially.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Why? If the sea level rises due to 'natural' temperature variations you'll still drown.
The most impressive thing about this web site is that its created by people in the U.S. government, the Bush White House hasn't shut it down and they haven't fired the people who created it, so shhhhh don't tell them about it because they must know its there because they really hate anyone who says stuff like this.
A lesser man would have interpreted that as evidence that the "conventional wisdom" that the Bush administration covers this stuff up might be in error. I salute your unshakeable faith.