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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!
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?
You also have to prioritise based upon possible casualties and cost of the threat.
Terrorism in the USA: A few billion dollars, a few thousand lives, maybe once every 10 years.
Warming: Sea defences, mass migration from low-land, and everything else: Hundreds of billions of dollars, millions? of lives, over the next 100 years.
"Keep your military in your own damn country; no-one likes a nosy neighbour."
OK. So when the EU can take care of, say, problems a days drive from Berlin, like Kosovo or Bosnia, the United States should leave Europe, of course when the entire Red Army and Warsaw Pact was sitting on the other side of the Fulda Gap, it was alright to be nosy.
What about Korea? Ready for the DPRK to burn Seoul? Or Japan? Ready for the PRC to get back at Japan for WW2? Or Taiwan? Ready for the PRC to get back at them for having the gaul to resist the PRC?
Or how about things no one hears about, like the Green Berets demining all over the world? Or American SAR saving lives in the deep ocean? Or how about the 82nd Airborne keeping the DMZ in the Sinai since 1977?
Or what about the US military being there to assist in the Indian Ocean after the Tsuamni? Australia is the only other one in the region with any sealift or airlift and it's a fraction of what the US has.
As soon as the rest of the World shows the slightest ability to not burn itself down the moment we pull back to the US, we'll be happy to, until you all man up, you are stuck with us.
I apologise, my intentions were mistaken here. I'm all for peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. Aiding after the Tsunami is a good thing, as is helping to enforce the DMZ. Iraq isn't. Afghanistan wasn't.
Your de-mining bit though; rather ironic considering that when last I heard, the U.S. still hadn't signed the international treaty banning anti-personnel mines.
And what threat did Iraq pose?? No WMD.
... blood for votes war? The war divided the fucking USA. How exactly did that win him votes? He won by a larger majority than 2000, but you act as if the war sealed the deal. I mean, the war was the single most hated thing about Bush by the left.
Actually, they did have WMD. Sarin gas for starters. What else went over the border to Syria and Iran, we'll probably never know. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Even the report that the media trotted out a few months ago highlighting the "NO WMDs" claim made it very clear that Saddam was going to keep his eyes on the WMD prize.
And this is completely setting aside the question of the oppression of Iraqis.
Let's face it. This was a blood for votes war started by Bush.
Wait, first it was a blood for oil war. But then everyone pointed out we weren't making out on Iraqi oil. (Just the UN made out on that, right?)
Now it's a
It's costing us billions of dollars and over 1000 American lives. And I don't give a shit if we did capture Saddam. His capture wasn't worth a single American life!
Is he worth hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Because that's how many his men have killed since he was in power. And they didn't just die from bombings, we're talking rape and torture. And no, not the kind of torture where people have sex in front of you and make you undress, but the kind where things are shoved up your ass that don't belong in your ass, where you are slowly killed, you know, real torture.
And that's not even counting the Iraqis that were just made to suffer under his rule.
I only hope that history will paint Bush as the evil little mental midget that he really is.
Sad to tell you this, but if Iraq gets a taste of democracy and it catches on in the middle east, Bush is going to be the Reagan of the 21st century.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Sad to tell you this, but if Iraq gets a taste of democracy and it catches on in the middle east
Yes, that's one possible outcome for Iraq. Another possible outcome is that out of all the chaos Iraq manages to form itself into an Islamic state - what Zawahiri and bin Laden have been trying (and repeatedly failing) to do for the last 15 years or so. Who knows, Zawahiri and bin Laden believe that, sould that actually happen it will cause the muslim masses to rise up, overthrow their leaders and create a slew of Islamic states throughout the middle east. That was, is, and will be their goal. For the most part the state "jihad against America" is a way to try and rally support - a lesson they learned when their attempted efforts in, for instance, Algeria failed to attract the support of the masses (oddly the general population was rather repelled, rather than attracted by, their violence).
So, we have 2 competing theories:
(1) Install a democracy in the Iraq and watch democracy then sweep the middle east.
(2) Rally support by encouraging people to rise up against the Americans that interfere in middle east politics and institute an Islamic state in Iraq. The Islamic Jihad movement can then sweep the middle east.
To be honest, no matter what happens in Iraq, I don't really expect anything to "sweep the middle east". In the meantime though the two theories seem to be fairly well in balance. Iraq is in chaos, there's ill will by the common people toward the US, and Islamic clerics (like al Sadr) are polling very well leading up the elections. In the meantime Iraq is actually having free and open elections so democracy will arrive. It looks to me if things could go either way - which means I'm not so sure this whole "introduce democracy and watch it spread through the middle east" idea was quite all it was cracked up to be.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Afghanistan was fine. Noticed how the world was with you and cheering you on when you went there ? But let us cut the crap. You didn't really go there to "extend freedom and democrocy". You went there to catch terrorists who had attacked you and to topple a regime which harboured these terrorists, and world agreed that you had the right. Freedom and democracy ? Well that was incidental. You *are* supposed to clean up after the mess you cause. If you create a power vaccum you would definitely be expected to protect the innocent civilians there from anarchial looting and rioting, by helping set up a democratic government.
As for Iraq ... for the umpteenth time, how was it a problem for you ? There are hundreds of tyrannical regime. Last I checked one of them actually became an ally despite having WMDs and caught profilerating the nuke technology *and* being a dictatorial regime, which had actually toppled the previous democratic government via a military coup.
You seem to be the only one buying into your fairytales about "extending freedom and democracy", when in reality you just support dictators usually.
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.
Afghanistan was a total sucess.
I have to agree with you there - it was pretty impressive how Bin Laden was captured so quickly. Uh.. oh.. wait...
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
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.