Slashdot Mirror
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."
And I was due to have some river front property.
Deleted
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
...our revised data show we're only going to graze that iceberg.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sea level is currently 0.000 meters above sea level, and is predicted to be 0.000 meters above sea level in 100 years.
man's impact on the environment has been 'downgraded'
I'll celebrate by having baked beens and onions for dinner.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I for myself still think global warming could be nice, after the initial, inevitable adaptation pains. More crops, more habitable lands.
Global warming does not imply more crops, or more habitable lands. It implies less. For example, a significant fraction of the world relies on the glaciers in the Himalayas for water. If those go, there will be vastly less habitable lands.
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
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.
Oh, the earth can certainly handle what we're throwing at it; even if we succeed in wiping ourselves and 99% of existing species out, evolution will just continue with the remaining 1% and produce something that can handle the new conditions. It won't be the first mass extinction.
Make no mistake: it's not about "saving the earth", it's about saving the human race, or at least civilization as we know it.
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.
You're missing the "global" in global warming. Just because the earth as a whole is getting warmer and the ice caps are melting, it doesn't necessarily mean your backyard is getting a tropical climate. For some regions the long-term prognosis is that it will get a whole lot colder -- for example, western Europe if the gulf stream shuts off.
One reasonable inference we can make is that weather will get more violent and less predictable, simply because we're pushing more energy into a system that exhibits chaotic behaviour. So expect more freak weather -- and on a local, short-term level, that's could just as well be snowstorms as heatwaves.
[Emphasis mine.]
Nicely trolled, sir. You've begged the question quite nicely, and you'd have effectively sand-bagged any reasoned response, except you forgot something: Your understanding doesn't matter. Your failure to comprehend scientific consensus has no effect on the accuracy of the findings, nor on the continuing refinement of the data models, which, after all, is what this story is reporting about.
Absolutely right, and on several of those occasions, the conditions were antithetical to human existence. See, the issue here is not saving the planet. Earth will do just fine, thank you very much. The issue, if I may, is saving the humans, who are not nearly so resilient, and to whom, heaven knows why, many of us seem to have a sentimental attachment. Perhaps it has something to do with being human ourselves.
HTH, HAND.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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
>our blind devotion to global warming
Straw man argument do not lead to good policy decisions.
>we simply don't know
There could be no better argument for avoiding large-scale experiments, then. But we do know that CO2 levels are rising, that it's not coming from living organisms, and that the pattern of change (warmer lower atmosphere, cooler upper atmosphere, warmer nights) matches the effects physics says to expect from CO2.
>So much for post-modern, secular humanism, eh?
Straw man arguments do not lead to good policy decisions.
>The earth has been around 6 billion years, give or take
4.5 billion.
>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?
Straw man arguments do not lead to good policy decisions. Neither do non sequiturs: none of the big excursions in the geological record happened while we were trying to feed six billion humans with climate-sensitive crops. Or had hundreds of millions of humans living within a few meters of sea level.
>When I see a Monday night football game in Seattle in November, and there's snow on the ground
A dry day in Seattle doesn't mean the climate is dry. A rainy day in Tucson doesn't mean the climate is wet. The fact that there was a cold day in winter in one place is not climate data. Confusing weather with climate, like the media do when they yammer about a heat wave during a climate change conference, is stupid.
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?
Most often when a reporter puts a quote at the end of the article, that quote presents the conclusion the reporter would like the reader to take away. In this case, it wasn't even worth the reporter's time explaining who in hell the "International Policy Network" is, let alone why an opinion from them should be pertinent here. Note also that the article above that details a lowered prediction of sea level rise precisely because there is now better data. So Mr. Morris's comment is a non sequitor.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Nicely trolled, sir. You've begged the question quite nicely, and you'd have effectively sand-bagged any reasoned response, except you forgot something: Your understanding doesn't matter.
Apparently, nobody's understanding matters.
I know a few things about global warming but I'm hardly a scientist. I do know what to look for when I'm gaging expertise, and total ignorance of evidence and blindly calling everyone a 'troll' who disagrees with you will definitely get your idea flushed down my mind's toilet.
The studies on this subject are not actually all that hard to read. When all is said and done, temperatures have only risen 0.6 degrees in the past 100 years. Yes I know it doesn't matter what happens globally, but in specific and dangerous locations like Greenland (whose ice loss we now know was exaggerated ).
This is all in addition to the standard gripes I have with the sensationalism and lies coming from the media, and the near silence of the scientific community unless confronted by inquisitive people. Peer review doesn't work if nobody's willing to speak. Essentially, the reported findings of the world's largest climate experiment stated "11 degrees"... the data really pointed to 3 degrees. "Peer review" was silent until a journalist ASKED them. Listen to the radio show link (earlier in this paragraph), it's chilling (note my brand new global warming pun!).
Latewire