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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."
Sea level is currently 0.000 meters above sea level, and is predicted to be 0.000 meters above sea level in 100 years.
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.
> 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 ... or, hell, maybe even compensate them for lost wealth? I don't know, I'm not an economist and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of negative replies for defending China or people cutting down rain forest for land. Oh well.
You are right on. This is an angle that the environmental movement has not yet come to terms with. The gorilla in the room is not the carbon production of the currently industrialized countries, it is the carbon production in the near future (20-50 years) of the currently inductrializing countries, which are far more populous. Most of the rhetoric of the global warming movement has been centered about modest lifestyle changes in developing countries: smaller cars, power conservation, and subsidizing carbon neutral energy sources. These are easy changes to make for the average westerner: They don't strongly impact our quality of life. Too bad the the carbon withheld from the atmosphere due to these changes is so small compared to the quantities that will be released a generation from now from the populous countries that are currently industrializing.
For the global warming movement to address the gorilla in the room, they would have to ask people in China and India to forgo that first refrigerator, automobile, computer, tractor, or paved road. And that is not a morally defensable or politically feasable position. Until the global warming movement faces up to this fact their efforts in the developed world are just a sideshow.
I think human carbon emmisions contribute to global warming, and that human carbon emmisions will explode in the next 50 years due to the industrialization of populated countries and due to increasing carbon emissions from alternative oil sources. (Coal gassification, tar sands, extra heavy oil... all of these release a ton of carbon just to produce, before they are even burned!) Greens should be lobbying the governments of devloped countries hard for r&d into affordable carbon neutral technologies that can be scaled to the meet to enourmous quantities of energy that the developing world will soon be demanding. The only tech. I know of that is carbon neutral, sufficiently scalable, reasonably affordable, and could be implemented on a massive scale just one generation from now is nuclear fission. If greens aren't advocating for this than I don't think they are serious about putting a major dent in global warming.
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
1) it's been more than 25 years ago...
2) back then, nobody had much of any idea of the effects.
3) what we were doing was the pinacle of high tech at the time. Pollution controls didn't exist, until we invented them.
Today, the Chinese government certainly knows the cause and effects of pollution, know the technology exists to significantly reduce the problem, and yet they don't bother to use it, anyhow, usually for reasons of national pride (they'd have to buy this tech from foreign companies, instead of using extremely dirty domesticly made products).
THAT is the difference.
So China shouldn't have to pay for their own pollution or pollution controls? Somebody else should pay for it, for them?
Not likely. China is now quite wealthy, they just chose not to control their pollution, because nobody has forced them to do so. Threaten to ban Chinese imports if they aren't produced "green", and they'll straighten up real fast. Of course I realize the political will to play chicken with cheap Chinese junk just isn't there, but that's besides the point.
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