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More Bad News About Global Warming
IZ Reloaded writes "A UK govt report says that greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts that previously thought. Greenhouse gases it says, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable. From BBC: The European Union has adopted a target of preventing a rise in global average temperature of more than two Celsius. That, according to the report, might be too high, with two degrees being enough to trigger melting of the Greenland ice sheet.... A rise of two Celsius, researchers conclude, will be enough to cause:
* Decreasing crop yields in the developing and developed world
* Tripling of poor harvests in Europe and Russia
* Large-scale displacement of people in north Africa from desertification
* Up to 2.8bn people at risk of water shortage
* 97% loss of coral reefs
* Total loss of summer Arctic sea ice causing extinction of the polar bear and the walrus
* Spread of malaria in Africa and north America"
I don't know where the hell your getting your "data" from but as a programmer with a physics degree I am able to pick up these supposed "pseudo" scientific journals (you many have heard of Nature for example) and understand not only the data presented but the scientific arguements surrounding the conclusions. 2005 was the hottest year since accurate records began so where the hell is the cooling?? Arguing whether global warming is actually happening or going to happen has long ended, however there is still a chance someone will believe the we're coming out of an ice age go about you business ploy.
C3PO - We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.
In Russia we are having one of the COLDEST winters in history!
It looks here that not a global warming, but a global permafrost is coming!
we experienced -15 F here! and some experienced -20!
China signed AND ratified the Kyoto protocol.
The US signed the Kyoto protocol, but did not ratify it.
Australia signed nor ratified the Kyoto protocol.
try RealClimate.org and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
I've read all the papers (a few in summary form only) from the conference on which this report is based. The BBC report accurately reflects what I have read.
You moron. The extinction of large mammals is a pretty damn serious effect. Go off and play with your toys and leave the talking to the adults.
Presumably, wooly mammoths and mastodons were victims of global warming. Please explain the "damn seriousness" of their extinction, and its long-term effects on whatever the fuck you were trying to talk about.
Citizens of the US: It's time to make your government take actions to stop global warming. You, the US, are the biggest contributor to global warming. In spite of this fact, the US does nothing. Join the EU and the rest of the world.
I'm going to ignore your silly troll, that got modded up, and provide some truth admist the $EMOTION-mongering:
Here is the data (mostly from 2002): Greenhouse gas emissions. As a point of information, while the US totally dominates total greenhouse emissions, we aren't #1 per capita, we are just #6. We are behind Paraguay, Luxembourg, Jamacia, Belize, and Australia. And before Canada gets all high and mighty, we are at 23.35, and you are at 23.11. And, for the record, the US has done alot to cut back on its GHG emissions, despite the fact that it is not part of Kyoto. Therefore, the quote "In spite of this fact, the US does nothing." is catagorically false. You may decide we haven't done enough, and I'd probably agree.
You have no right to damage the Earth! It's not yours.
Tell that to Luxembourg. Har har.
Scientific reasoning funnily enough. CO2 contributes
to the greenhouse effect by its absorbtion of infra red wavelengths. Add more CO2 and more infra red gets absorbed and the atmosphere (all other things being equal - though thats not a given) gets warmer. Its not rocket science.
Solar and wind power is great, but you need a lot of space, and continuous wind and sunlight for them to be worthwhile. Wind power gets maligned for the damage it causes to birds, but I'm not really worried about the sparrow, pigeon, and crow populations. There is some interesting wind research being done on Canada's Prince Edward Island, with vertical, horizontal, and variable-incidence and -wind-speed devices.
Hydro power is clean, endlessly renewable, and well understood, but gets bad-mouthed for the impact it has on migrating fish populations. Wave power is an interesting possibility, but more research needs to be done on it.
At the personal - ie non-grid - level, installing better insulation, efficient HVAC systems, and switching to fuel cells for home power supplementation/generation are all things many homeowners can do to improve their personal costs, and reduce their draw from the grid.
Since the world's population is likely to only expand for a while yet, it would be good for the countries that can afford it to move to better sources of power generation to start to clean the air of particulate matter over themselves. It's really a political decision, though, now, and not an economic one. For several years it has been more economically viable (mid- to long-term) to use non-fossil fuel generation, but the political will to do so hasn't been there. Maybe with current oil prices it will begin to appear.
antipaucity
Any sources? We are currently #6 in Carbon Dioxide production per capita. And Canada is barely trailing us.h ouse_emissions.htm
I will concede, the trends in the US are not good. The UK is doing a much better job of improving. In the next 10 years I could see us no longer being a leader in renewable resource usage. THAT is a problem.
http://unstats.un.org/unsd//environment/air_green
PR firms are noted for producing bovine excrement. They are really good at polishing it to make it look good, but it doesn't change its essence. If you want to know where climate scientists stand, you should read stuff written by climate scientists.
Sorry, but that's an outright lie. See Myth #1 (and read the rest). You can find the Keeling curve and atmospheric composition data derived from the Vostok ice core (going back 650,000 years) at The Ergosphere.Sustainability and energy independence essay
>Animals and volcanoes produce far more CO2 than cars and industry. CO2 and Methane are greenhouse gasses, but they are also naturally occuring.
Completely incorrect.
http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html
"Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times."
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
People like to claim this, and there's some truth in that the solar energy output does fluctuate, but when I worked for NASA, when we calibrated our images, we treated solar energy output as a constant, because those variations were too small to affect the calibration. The eccentricity of orbit played a much larger role in varying the solar energy received on planetary surfaces.
The approximate average temperature of a body Tb illuminated by a blackbody radiator (which stars are close enough to to make little difference) of temp T, with radius R, where the body has an albedo A and is distance D away is given as:
Tb = T * ( 1 - A)**.25 * ((R/2.0*D)**.5)
If we assume Earth's albedo is .36, the temp of the sun is 5860 K, the solar radius is 696,000 km, and the Earth is 1.5e8 km away, we get 251 degrees K, which is very chilly, but this doesn't include greenhouse and convection effects (try this calculation on Venus to see what I mean!)
If we make the Sun 100 K hotter, the new temperature on earth goes to 255 degrees kelvin. Now, I'm not a solar scientist (and there's several on /. whom I've had the pleasure of meeting over the years who can correct me if I'm wrong), but I don't think the sun's mean temperature varies by anything close to that amount. With that, you get a 4 degree kelvin increase in solar heating. That's it.
Unless one wants to reject all of physics from Maxwell onwards, I think another explanation than increased solar activity would have to be found for warming effects. This doesn't mean that I buy the gloom and doom scenarios put out by those who warn of global warning (nor do I reject them), but I do believe that good science is required, and I've seen more than enough bad science brought up by both sides of this debate.
>> In Russia we are having one of the COLDEST winters in history!
... the balmy UK winters will start to look more like those of Siberia.
It's only the planetary average temperature that will increase with global warming, and not by a lot.
In contrast, local temperatures will both increase and decrease in a far more complicated pattern across the world, and by comparatively large amounts. Although simulations vary quite a lot in their predictions, the areas of major change are quite clear.
Northern Europe seems quite likely to suffer the largest downward changes, because an early consequence of the melting of the Greenland glaciers and surrounding ice shelves will be that the "Atlantic Conveyor" (a closed circuit of ocean currents) will grind to a halt. The Gulf Stream is already slowing, and there is absolutely no way to reverse this trend. The inevitable result will be that the quite warm climate in the coastal European countries up at around 50-60 degrees North will plunge towards the deep continental average
Likewise, the equatorial hot spots are expected to rise in temperature by a lot more than the planetary average, with quite appalling consequences for their populations. Anyone who thinks that "2 degrees of global warming" will be barely noticeable in Africa is confusing "global" with "local".
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Do yourself a favor and go read some studies on the history of climate change over the last 100,000 years (taken from ice samples). I don't argue that dumping stuff into the atmosphere is bad, but fluctuations in global climate is rather common. There have been times in the planet's past (within the last 100,000) years where the climate was MUCH warmer with much higher concentrations of C02.
Has it been warmer in the last 100,000 years? No, but if they stretch that to 150,000 then yes it has been warmer than it is now. "Much" warmer is perhaps an exageration though. Has there been much higher CO2 concentrations? Not even close. Current CO2 concentrations represent spike in CO2 levels twice as large as any previous spike in the last 650,000 years. What des that have to do with temperature? Take a look at a chart of and see how closely they correlate. Now realise that in that plot current CO2 levels are at 5.5 on that scale! Yes, correlation doesn't imply causation. Basic physics regarding absroption spectra of CO2 is hat implies causation, the correlation just shows that theory bears out in practice.
Jedidiah.
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1. Climate is not weather; this was kinda his point. No one is making 100 year weather forcasts, they are making 100 year CLIMATE predictions.
2. We now have over 600,000 years of good climate and CO2 data, from the ice cores.
3. When they retreived the earliest 200,000 years or so of that data, the ice core people released the temperature data, and challenged the modeling people to predict the CO2 accompanying levels. They did, and when the ice core people subsequently released the CO2 data, the modelers were spot on with their predictions. Close to 200,000 years of BLIND PREDICTED CO2 levels, tracked very, very closely to observed data.
That amounts to a little more than 100 years of observation.