Billions Face Risks From Climate Change

gollum123 writes with a link to a kind of grim BBC story. According to a report drawn up by 'hundreds of international environmental experts', billions of people face drought and famine, as well as an increase in natural disasters, as a result of climate change. Individuals in the poorest countries face the most danger, due to a lack of infrastructure and geographic location. "The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world. Eighty-nine percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world. Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft."

Comments

I don't buy it

[MarkPNeyer]

Forgive me for not towing the line, but I find this stuff really hard to believe.

Re:I don't buy it

[MarkPNeyer]

Sure, you can play with the models, but there's no guarantee that the models are accurate. The experimental data seems questionable; they're saying that that the average temperature has risen less than one degree over the past century - I don't think you could possibly gather data that precise on temperatures, especially over 50 years ago.

those "several delegations" should *#$ themselves.

[plasmacutter]

Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft."

and several delegations within the US want textbooks to reflect less certainty about evolution, and business interests want employment reports to reflect less certainty about offshoring..

these people should got @#$#@$ themselves because at this point there is no more contention on global warming besides those troglodites who refuse to let go of the past and want to politicise the issue.

Re:those "several delegations" should *#$ themselv

[MarkPNeyer]

Trogolodytes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientists_opposing_t he_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warm ing

People like you are ruining science.

One problem.

[Chas]

"This is another wake up call for governments, industry and individuals. We now have a clearer indication of the potential impact of global warming, some of which is already inevitable,"

Okay, first off, I'll pretend I fully buy into the "human-caused global warming" schtick. I don't. We may be CONTRIBUTORS, but not the root cause. But anyhoo, I'll bite in the "human-caused" thing for the sake of argument.

Even if the human race were to cease all industrial and agricultural output of greenhouse gas NOW (this very second), it wouldn't make a bit of difference in the warming trend. The material we've put in the atmosphere will continue this trend for at least the next century. So what exactly do they expect people to do?

People are going to have to do what they've always done when their environment gets hostile. Adapt.

and what about their reputations?

[plasmacutter]

and what are their reputations?

if theyre like the scientists who support ID then you have a problem.

Denial Spam

[catchblue22]

How long before this discussion is dominated by denial spam?

Source?

[stratjakt]

"IPCC Scientists" sounded pretty official, so I googled it up.

established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the IPCC is the authoritative international body charged with studying climate change. The IPCC surveys the worldwide technical and scientific literature on climate change and publishes assessment reports.

Ok, so they dont conduct their own research. They aren't really scientists, are they?

Sounds like one could make an argument they spend their days digging up reasons for themselves to even exist. I mean, surely a task force set up to "survey global warming research" doesn't have it in their best interests to conclude anything less than doom and gloom.

Being UN funded, no doubt they are highly politically motivated, and likely corrupt from the top down. I'm sure this is all fronting up another Kyoto-like scheme to redisperse US money around the world.

But hey, maybe if we all jerk our knees hard enough at the same time, the earth will cool down a lil bit.

Also, (most) people are smart enough to move when their land floods or dries out. The entire population of a geographic area doesn't have to die, most will relocate and/or adapt, as we've always done.

Re:Certainty

[Flyers2391]

the Bush administration was "certain" about WMDs too...

Re:More Hysteria

[dlhm]

You are absolutely right. But people won't believe you, most laymen are mental-midgets, and do not have the capacity to think on scales of a global magnitude. The problem doesn't lie in what the people are doing but in what people are able to conceive.

Re:Big mirror

[drix]

The facts support my opinion, dipshit. I'm tired of seeing sound research and an overwhelming plurality of scientists being backed into a corner by a small, vocal minority of agenda peddlers proclaiming their persecution at every turn. Yes you are entitled to your opinion, yes you are entitled to dissent, but the act of your dissenting in no way strengthens your case beyond proportion: you are one solitary voice, lost amongst a chorus of those say you are wrong. The lack of total consensus doesn't invalidate underlying debate, no matter how much you wish it.

So if you have something constructive to add, I'm all ears. The world awaits you, and you'd best hurry, because the tide of opinion is fast turning against you. OTOH, if you're content with sniping from behind the AC facade, well, that's rather telling, isn't it?

Its the sun, stupid - Solar data supports it

[wattsup]

I've been in Meteorology since 1978. I don't put any faith in the IPCC report whatsoever.

James Carville used to remind Clinton during the '92 campaign that "its the economy, stupid".

I (and many others far smarter than I am) say that on the subject of Global Warming: "its the SUN, stupid"

Our earth is warmed by a gigantic nuclear fireball, millions of times the mass of earth and a mere 8.5 light-minutes away. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun's disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths.

By the way, the sun has a total luminosity output of 386 YottaWatts thats 386,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts, but we only get a tiny portion of that.

You can't just ignore that kind of power. But a lot of researchers do, and simply dismiss our solar irradiance and it's variability out of hand. It muddles up the GHG modeling study they are doing when you throw extra energy into the system.

The total luminous energy output (visible, IR) received by earth from the sun is 174 PETAWATTS (174,000,000,000,000,000) watts. Now lets just say the sun increases its output by 0.1% as its been measured to do. (And its gotten way more active this century.) That dumps an extra 174,000,000,000,000 watts into our atmosphere (174 trillion watts) 24/7.

See the plot of Solar Irradiance from NOAA data here
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/irradiance.g if

Data source for graph: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_f orcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt

Note: In the graph above, the low flatline from 1645-1715 is the Maunder Minimum, a period of virtually no sunspots, where the historical reports from the northern hemisphere tell a story of dramatic climate change: harsh winters, cools summers, crop failures, famine and disease.

Now lets put 174 trillion watts into perspective:

Hurricanes: the heat energy released by a hurricanes category 1-5 equals about 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.

Katrina, released about 200 trillion watts over its life cycle.

Now imagine that approximate amount of extra energy being added to earth's atmosphere every second by small increases in the suns output that have been documented to exist.

Now lets look at us: 13.5 TeraWatts is the average total power consumption of the human world in 2001.

Do you think we could change the planets atmospheric energy balance with that if we squeezed all the power we made that year together and shot it into our atmosphere ?

Yeah, its the sun, stupid.

What makes you think lowering CO2 will cool us?

[Budenny]

If you look at the statistical history of CO2 and temperature two things leap out at you.

One is that CO2 rises followed, and did not precede, periods of warming. How then can they have caused them.

Two is that CO2 falls are unrelated to periods of cooling.

We have a quite long history of these two time series, and you cannot look at it without seeing that there is no causal relationship.

So why exactly does anyone think that lowering CO2 levels will produce cooling? It never has before. Let alone, why does anyone think that lowering man made CO2 will lower total atmospheric CO2.

Re:Skeptics, what's your program?

[hmbJeff]

I think "vast sums of money in government handouts" is a bit overblown. The entire budget for the U.S. National Institute of Science (NIST) is about $640 million for 2008. According to this summary, about $5 million of that was set aside for "Measurements and Standards for the Climate Change Science Program" (although NASA and NOAA probably spend a lot more). Exxon Mobil alone is making 10 billion dollars of profit (not revenue) every 3 months. Who is getting the "vast sums of money"?
 
I suspect this fear of environmentalists is mostly just a fear that someone will try to tell you what you should (or should not) do, and you might not like what they say. That is understandable. However, the mentaility of the lone rugged individualist "doin what I want with MY land" has always been a false abstraction even when people were spread thin, as no piece of land exists in isolation from the rest (unless you happen to live in the biosphere project ;-). It is suicidal when applied to a population approaching 7 billion armed with technology, a market-driven mythology of infinite growth, and 10 million gallons a minute of oil equivalent fossil energy (to put this number into perspective, one gallon of gasoline provides usable energy equivalent to about 2 months worth of human physical labor. Thus, every minute, fossil fuels provide the equivalent energy of over 200 billion extra humans working).
 
And why the hyperbole of "Gaia-worship-by-force"? Most enviromentalists I know are exquisitely practical in their thinking. They see systems in operation that SIMPLY CANNOT BE SUSTAINED OVER TIME and treat this as a problem to be solved. I suspect that you too would acknowledge, if asked in a respectful manner and encouraged to extrapolate things you already observe or believe, that things cannot go on this way much longer. Environmentalists look for workable solutions to this dilemma that can be applied early enough that there is some hope of having an effect before critical natural systems reach a point where they essentially fail to operate. Mostly they want to start by leveling the playing field for alternatives, or by giving them a minor start-up boost to help overcome the inertia of entrenched approaches.
 
As for Gaia worship, yes, environmentalists frequently look to biological systems for guidance. This is because they are the only systems known that can continue to operate successfully for extended time periods without catastrophic failure. Properly cared for farmland can be (and has been) productive for tens or hundreds of generations WITH NO EXTERNAL INPUTS except for the input of the sun and the natural distribution mechnisms of the water, carbon and other cycles. No technological solution ever devised can come close to doing this (the majority of farming done today is an industrial process for turning petroleum and natural gas into food--see The Omnivore's Dilemma for a good exploration of this).
 
Again, I ask, what is the program? Because one's personal unease with the consequences being a sprawling race on a fragile lifeboat is no substitute for a workable plan.