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UN Report Downgrades Human Impact on Climate
GodInHell writes to mention an article in the Telegraph, stating that man's impact on the environment has been 'downgraded'. A UN report has found that our species has not had as large effect on climate change as was previously thought. The average temperature is still due to rise almost 5 degrees C in the next 100 years, bringing drastic changes in weather patterns. From the article: "The panel, however, has lowered predictions of how much sea levels will rise in comparison with its last report in 2001. Climate change skeptics are expected to seize on the revised figures as evidence that action to combat global warming is less urgent. Scientists insist that the lower estimates for sea levels and the human impact on global warming are simply a refinement due to better data on how climate works rather than a reduction in the risk posed by global warming."
Led by China, they don't want their "path to prosperity" cut off by the big 5 or 6, who already burned the carbon, and will maintain another era of dominance.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes, God forbid an international agency change its mind about something when new information sheds light on the problem!
There is nothing admirable about stubbornness in face of facts. I, for one, am glad that the UN isn't dragging it's feet on this issue. If only others were so prescient.
Meta, Meta, Meta
Politics apart, if sea levels forecasts are lowered, that in itself represents a lower risk.
The logic is so simple, it is even ridiculous: part of the risk of global warming is higher sea levels.
If sea levels are not expected to be so high, to the expected risk is not so high.
Now if (these) scientists think the risk is still high enough to still warrant our worries, that is quite another thing.
I for myself still think global warming could be nice, after the initial, inevitable adaptation pains. More crops, more habitable lands.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
"Scientists insist that the lower estimates for sea levels and the human impact on global warming are simply a refinement due to better data on how climate works rather than a reduction in the risk posed by global warming."
Wait...wait...the sea won't rise as high, and yet the risk is the same...someone explain that one to me.
Personally I've always been a fan of the 'Humans aren't capable of doing much damage to the Earth' theorists who say it's due to the sun becoming hotter (which happens quite often, don't laugh) or some other kind of trend we haven't been around long enough to notice.
Of course they claim that it's because the Ocean's absorbing it and aerosols are reflecting it so I guess I'm still a crackpot eh? Anyone else notice that every Global Warming report seems the same? 'Our last estimate was too high, but it's still dire because of "insert new theory/problem"'?
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
perhaps we can rethink our blind devotion to global warming and man's supposed virulent impact. I have never understood why is it accepted completely that we're somehow responsible for supposed "global warming" and that we think we can do anything about it. There is still much scientific debate (unless looking for government research funding) and (yes, I RTFA) much information still coming in and I'm sure more will come in the future. The truth is probably more troublesome, in that we simply don't know. We live in a world of perfect access to information, and we expect to be able to know everything, and we assume we have complete control as well. So much for post-modern, secular humanism, eh? We are not omnipotent and omniscient.
The earth has been around 6 billion years, give or take, and it's gone through more violent and extreme changes long before a single human emerged from the primordial sludge. And now we're to believe that somehow earth's perfect harmonial environemntal equilibirum, which never ever existed in the first place, is being upset by man? When I see a Monday night football game in Seattle in November, and there's snow on the ground, I can only conclude "global warming" is causing it. Sure.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
And it's not pretty either. Even if you ignore global warming or global climate change for a moment, you just have to step outside in any of our urban centers, look at the sky and take a whiff. Of course we're hurting and changing the environment. That's the real shame of it. I happen to work with an environmental scientist and he says the number one bad thing that everyone is ignoring is the short-term, immediate affect on our health. We're slowly killing ourselves in our own pollution.
Whether the long-term effect of what we do is 10 degrees of warming, 5 degrees of warming, or even 5 degrees of cooling, we're still have a pretty drastic affect on the poor earth. Apparently, there is new research coming out all the time (and not from the grand right-wing conspiracy) that global warming isn't happening as fast as some think. But does it really matter that it's slower than we thought? We still have to confront the same issues. Net carbon increase, particulates, and nitrous oxides, all of which damage our health, as well as the environment.
It really doesn't matter to what extent Global Warming is man's problem or nature's: it's still happening, and we can still help slow it down.
It's clear that it's heppening, now do we want it to happen faster, or slower?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
So, when we chastise other nations for doing what we did 25 years ago, we may be hobbling them somewhat in the international market if we force them not to do that. I mean, look at the great infrastructure and products that we've produced while destroying the environment. You have to admit that it's given us an upper hand.
And this doesn't just apply to chemicals and gases, remember our 'save the rain forest' campaigns? Well, who was campaigning us to stop logging in North America (pictures on the right side)? We've literally deforested much of the United States and benefited from it quite a bit. Who's to say we're not completely hobbling the economies in 3rd world countries that are attempting to tap their nation's natural resources of wood?
I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative
My work here is dung.
The difference is in how it's delivered. Having a steady flow of melt-water is much nicer for agriculture than occasional flash flooding, even if the later does provide more water per year on average.
--MarkusQ
The real case:
Someone tells you that, if you don't take drastic action right now, your house will catch on fire some time in the next 100 years. A while back, the same guy was telling you the house was going to be flooded due to the same actions that will now, supposedly cause that fire.
The current "fire prediction panel" has downgraded the actual fire risk, to boot, since all of their previous predictions of fire have not come true, and it turns out that some of the evidence they were using to predict the fire was actually made up. It seems that the computer model they were using also predicts fire if you put random noise into the input hopper.
Meanwhile, the people who scream most about how the fire will destroy the house are going to bed while smoking, while insisting that you need to turn out all of your lights and sleep on the floor.
Let's try a better metaphore. Let's say you wake up one night and think that because your house is made of wood, that it might catch fire if some burning embers from a lit cigarette fall on it, after all, that's how smokey the bear says forest fires get started.
So you institute an imediate policy againsts lit cigarettes of all types within 100 yards of your house and comission some studies on house fires.
Over the years, your studies begin to reveal that while cigarettes can cause a fire, it's not the most likely cause.
Do you continue your capaign against cigarettes or do you revise your protection models.
The point is, your house isn't on fire, it's at risk, but effective safety is knowing which risks are most important to minimize.
Also the point is that analogies are shitty, why don't you just say what you mean, which is, despite the fact that the study shows human impact is lesser AND shows that newer understandings demonstrate a reduced risk, you would rather blindly continue with current policies as is, much like the few crackpots who completely deny global warming want to continue with their current policies as is.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It's ALL bullshit. Hyperbolic hysteria and it harms the case of the environmentalists.
Civilisation will not end.
The human race will certainly not become extinct.
99% of the existing species will also not be made extinct.
The planet will not end.
Deleted
So climate changes? Big deal. It always has and always will, locally and gobally, with or without human intervention. It does not matter a bit whether the next climate change will be caused by human activity or not.
The current peak in CO2 emissions will decline all by itself when the coal and hydrocarbon deposits slowly run out. As those reserves are, in historic timescales, basically fixed, so is the total amount of CO2 that will eventually be released back into the biosphere, and it does not really matter if this happens in 200, 500 or 1000 years. Will will have to deal with the effects eventually, both the economic (the end of the fossil fuel era) as well as any climatic ones (in addition to any climatic changes which come about for unrelated reasons).
And guess what? That's exactly what we will do! If the oil supply stopped overnight, it would be the end of the world as we know it. If global sealevels rose five or ten meters within a week, it would be a global catastrophy. If the same things happen in the course of a decade, it will be a huge crisis, but civilisation will survive. If it happens over the course of a century (in line with the most pessimistic scenarios), mankind will face huge changes, of course, but to the average person, IMO, those changes will be LESS noticable then the major conflicts and revolutions of the 20th century. Think about how life has changed for the average European or American in the last hundred of years.
Adopting to slowly changing circumstances is something that we, as humans, are really good at. It's basically our second nature. We are so good at dealing with these slow revolutions, that most of us don't notice them in their everyday life.
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
Once again, newpapers show that they have absolutely zero knowledge of science or statistics. Tell me, if I do two experiments to try and find the radius of the earth, and find the first time that my results are 6,370 +/- 3210 km, and the second time that my results are 6370 +/- 10km , is this 'junk science' because my upper bound has dropped by 33%? Of course not. All this quote shows is that their calculations are getting more precise. If you want to show that they were wrong in their last report you'd have to show a large change in their AVERAGE value, and since the sensationalist reporter here didn't bother to even quote it, there's nothing we can say.
By the way, if you want to, you can see projections of sea level from the 2001 report online. The sea level rise for several different scenarios is given in the graph on the right. The overall error bounds are larger because they combine all the data for these scenarios, which are vastly different in their assumptions about economic, technological and population growth in the next century.
I came here for a good argument
I am always reminded of the Maynard Keynes quote,
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
I, for one, wouldn't want us mucking around trying to change nature under the auspices that we're doing it for nature's own good.
Mucking about doing unnatural things like burning less oil?
From the article: The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
That is a huge change (and bear in mind that's the "upper estimate") and shows that this has about the same rigor as, say, sociology or, maybe, economics. Basically, we don't really understand this incredibly complex weather system because it's way too complex with its huge number of sub-systems and sub-sub-systems, etc., that we are still discovering (putting aside understanding how they work and why). It's only to be expected that the IPCC messes up on a major prediction.
And why did the IPCC lower the range? It turns out that the aerosols that were banned way back because they were "evil" had a beneficial effect -- with respect to global warming. Who knew?
And that's the point: we don't know. We all want to solve the problem NOW, but in extremely large scale systems that's extremely difficult. We might look at a coding practice for a guideline: change only one thing at a time, then see what happens. If everything's OK, try another small change. Changing a lot of stuff at once is almost certain to make the system worse and much more difficult to get right.
So, because humanity has survived many a storied & horrid deprevation, this next repulsive calamity will be more of the same, namely:
ocean levels rising
large swaths of the most densely populated land in the world vanishing beneath the waves
tropical diseases heading north
the desertification of the tropics
Yes, we will deal with it. We'll probably handle it the same way that we handled the wars that you mentioned: by fighting each other and making a bad situation worse.
Would you tell a heroin addict to continue shooting up since the consequences will resemble his previous anguishes? Would you suggest that a diabetic with an amputated foot have a get-well cake, seeing as how losing the leg is sorta like losing the foot?
You are wrong. There are numerous environmental organizations working on the issues of the industrializing nations. Just because you have not heard of them, does not mean they do not exist. Here is just one example.
This completely misses the point. The focus is not on modest lifestyle changes, it is on developing technologies that produce major impacts on carbon dioxide emissions, with only modest impacts on lifestyle. It's not just about getting everyone to buy a smaller car--the important work is getting the car makers to produce much more efficient machines that do the same thing. My 1997 car gets 30 MPG; my mom's hybrid gets more than 40 MPG; and my friend's turbo diesel gets 50 MPG. All three cars are the same size and go the same speed.
Bullshit, this is a stupid straw man. The U.S. went through our polluting phase with these technologies because we were developing them for the first time. Now they are already developed and vastly improved. There is absolutely no reason China should have to recapitulate the entire nasty process, especially when we are so open to sharing technology and subsidizing a modern manufacturing base through open global trade. The point is to encourage them to learn from our mistakes and build energy efficiency and clean technologies into their infrastructure from the beginning--a choice we did not have.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.