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Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds
Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."
Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan
Woah there... as a philosophy geek that's done entire courses on Leviathan alone, I can say definitively that you are way out of left field with that one. Hobbes predicted nothing of the sort no matter how you interpret it. The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.
A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book
I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem.
Limits to Growth wasn't bullshit. Its predictions are pretty much coming to pass, and pretty much on time. There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out .... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.
Bitter and proud of it.
I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem. Mars receives a tiny percentage of the Sun light the Earth does so we should be seeing a corresponding percentage increase. Jupiter's climate is mostly driven from its internal heat not the Sun (and we really don't know much about that). What about all the other planets, Mercury? Venus?
The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change.
"According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people died of starvation every day in 2003" - Wikipedia article on starvation.
Mass starvation doesn't mean that everyone in the world is starving at once.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
In the 70s they were also predicting a coming ice age.
That has been refuted even here on Slashdot IIRC. Global Cooling article in Wikipedia says:
"Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming."
Which doesn't mean your statement is necessary false, but you should provide some data supporting it.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
Though the experts were certainly wrong, let's not imply we're doing anywhere near a decent job of providing food for all mankind. Some 50,000 people die each day from starvation. Countless more live in a chronically malnourished state. True, this is not because of an inability to grow the food (probably what the experts predicted) but because of myriad other reasons from politics to economics to logistics.
Cheers.
The Meadows & al. report is probably, just like the IPCC report on climate change today, among these documents that 99% of the people that quote them never read, given the quantity of conclusions supposedly included in this paper that are not found once it is read. ... In short, this "famous" report, that some accuse today of having all possible flaws because no disaster happened yet (!), is nothing else than a scientific paper a little long, presenting the research work that was done to build a model, use it, and the results obtained.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7
Barely
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
In a perfect NIMBY world we'd be hunting with wooden spears.
As a social scientist I can't live with myself if I let this slip. Actually Hobbes's depiction of life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the exact opposite of a "prediction". It describes life not in the future but in the hypothetical and long past "state of nature", before the development of civilized society and the State (The Leviathan) which puts an end to "the war of each against all" that causes life to be "nasty, brutish and short" in the "state of nature". The transformation is purely social, based on a contract between individuals who agree to submit to a strong authority in exchange for personal security. The development of technology etc. does not come into the discussion in any significant manner in Hobbes, although you could argue for that as a factor independently.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
What I don't understand is why is everyone so obsessed with CO2. Humanity produces but ~2% of it, the rest is produced naturally by volcanoes, forest fires and such. If we all stop producing CO2 tomorrow, nothing will change, it's about time we realized that we are NOT gods and stop playing one. Yes, it's nice to have less pollutants in our cities but let's call it that and not the cure for global warming. Global warming is a natural process that has happened in the past without humans and will happen with or without them again.
Regardless of what you were taught in school 20 years ago, that's not what the actual Limits to Growth report said. There was a lot of bogus information propagated about the Limits to Growth report at the time it came out, largely by people who didn't like what it actually had to say. The reality is that the Limits to Growth report explored a number of different possible scenarios (varying assumptions such as the impact of technological change and of social policies), and found that most (but not all) scenarios seem to lead to some kind of "overshoot and collapse" in the mid to late 21st century. These were never meant to be precise predictions, but rather to provide some idea of the global system's behavioral tendencies. Interestingly, a recent study has found that the Limits to Growth "standard run" scenario tracks quite well with the actual observed behavior of the world over the last 30 years. As the abstract of that report says:
For every scientist that says "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!" another one says "Erm... No we're not." Just like "video games causes violent behaviour" and "video games don't cause violent behaviour".
Scientists generally don't say "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!", though the media sometimes spin it that way. Also, if you think scientists are equally split on the issue of climate change, you are sadly deluded.
It's also very hard to take to any talk of global warming that seriously when a large chunk of the northern hemisphere is freezing its ass off.
Please look up the difference between "climate" and "weather".
Then there's the United Kingdom. The Roman's used to grow grapes there. Now if people grew grapes there today folk would say "Look, global warming! There's your proof." Only this occurred hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution...
Grapes have been grown in the UK for hundreds of years, and they are grown there now. Except historically they were grown in the south of England, and now they are being grown in Wales. Global warming is making wine making more viable in the UK.
They're starving due to politics.
Case in point: Zimbabwe
10 years ago, it was a breadbasket that fed itself and had food left over for export.
Today it's a basket-case where people are starving to death.
The land is still there, the people are still there, and no plague, blight* or drought destroyed production. It was pure, 100% politics that sent Zimbabwe down the crapper.
(*however, Mugabe may count as a blight, plague or both)
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
The stock answer is it is because the system is so delicately balanced that our small contribution puts it out of balance.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
I grew up in Zimbabwe and I have family living their right now. So I know perfectly well what is going on over there. And the fact remains, those people really can't feed themselves and deserve help. If you bothered reading my post, and understood it then you'd realize I pointed out two separate groups. Lazy people needing aid who actually are able to feed themselves if not for their laziness, and then you have people that need aid that are actually unable to get aid. Such as those people in Zimbabwe, or people living in a disaster or war torn area.
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
If you actually knew your history rather than assuming that things then were as things now, you'd know that the public transit system in New York was not built by the government, but by private enterprise looking to make a buck. The move to put it underground was funded by city bonds, but it the elevated train system was already there. Furthermore, "auto-centric" laws came as result of the mass adoption of automobiles by the public at large, not the other way around.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Weather is not even close to the same thing as climate. Remember when we learned that in High School freshman science class? I can say the average temperature will go up over the next number of years, but that doesn't mean I know if it will be cloudy on March 5th, 2010.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
I can't tell you what temperature it will be tomorrow. We've had days as cold as -15 or so (with wind chill) and as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, all in the same winter.
But I can tell you that it is winter, and without looking at the forecast, I can tell you that it will probably be cold. And I can also tell you, without much difficulty, that summer will be mostly warm, and winter will be mostly cold.
Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
Before humans, were forests ever clear-cut? There were forest fires, as a healthy part of the lifecycle of a forest, but were they ever completely cut down to roots?
Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?
Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?
So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?
There may actually be good arguments against global warming, but you're just embarrassing yourself, here. Ice shelves are melting. They are melting farther than before, and faster than before. There is more carbon dioxide, and the average temperature is rising.
Yes, we've had ice ages in the past. Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here. But I don't particularly want to live through an ice age, if I can help it -- or the opposite.
Let me ask you something. Since most scientists who actually have more than a passing familiarity with the subject overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening -- since Ford himself has outright admitted that global warming is real, and that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the problem -- where's the motive for such a vast conspiracy? Or if it's vast stupidity, don't you think an intelligent scientist would have shown it to be so, and provided evidence to that effect -- rather than yet more evidence to support that the climate is changing, and that we are doing it?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did popularize the issues and did a lot of direct work on solutions, which helped speed these innovations (implementation starting before the automobile was conceived, and a long time before the automobile became a significant factor):
These and similar endeavors received support from city governments through ordinances, city brokered bond issues, changes in laws. Between 1897 and 1910, they significantly altered city transportation systems, and through that, all aspects of city life. So the changes were in place before the number of automobile drivers had reached significance.
The annals of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) documents this with respect to bicycles. Known as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) until updating its name in 1994, it was founded in 1880 and had become a major lobbying group for paved streets and sensible and consistent traffic laws by 1895. It is one of the very few organizations that had a political impact on urban affairs before 1900 that is still effective and relevant today. The LAW acronym was very deliberate: this group has had more impact on traffic law development than any one else, including the automotive industry, which mostly tweaked traffic laws that had been developed for safer bicycling. Wikipedia article on LAB gives a quick, highly glossed 3rd party description of the organization.
Parent post asserts that
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
This is false.
The changes were in fact brought about through local political processes like committees using mostly well established technologies like horse drawn trolleys and livery services in controlled ways. Wide area organizations like LAW provided input and attempted to shape the local processes. Arguably the most important innovation during this period was a change in pavement from cobblestones to brick, asphalt, and oiled surfaces-- to improve bicycling conditions.
This is kind of important stuff to know today, because in the city nearest you, there are definitely efforts to reshape the transportation system to something greener, and these efforts involve the same processes that were in extensive use 110 years ago, before the automobile.
Almost all industrialized countries have birth rates that are at or have fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per family. All population growth is coming from the developing world. HIREZ.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Right like all those folks in the 70's who were predicting a massive iceage... oh wait they moved onto golbal warming, than to global 'climate change' (something that always happens), and next to?
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
There's probably no point but this simply must be replied to.
Firstly, weather and climate are different and distinct problems. Weather is the current state of the atmosphere. It is a process sensitively dependent on initial conditions, i.e. chaotic (at least to some degree). It is now and will always remain imposible to predict with accuracy more than, say, two weeks in advance. It won't matter how much more precisely you can collect your initial conditions or how perfectly you can design your model the state of the weather in your forecast will diverge from the observed state. This is not new. This is not a surprise. You just don't have a clue.
Secondly, climate is the statistical summary of the weather over different spatial and temporal scales. It is not chaotic. In fact it seems that, though complex and though driven by many interconnected positive and negative feedbacks, it is not something that we can't work out. Changes in the climate, the averages, the extremes and the standard deviations of different observables are obtainable with a (relatively) greater degree of confidence for long times into the future. This is an endeavour where improvements to understanding of the physics of the interconnected systems does lead to incremental improvements in the "forecast" of the climate.
Realise also that studying the climate will lead to understand of how the statistical distributions of weather events are most likely to change. The most advanced climate models will never predict exactly how great (or small) the additional rainfall will be. It will never predict the precise hottest (or coldest) new temperature extreme. What it will tell you is how likely such events will become in a changed climate compared to today.
Individual floods, heat waves, droughts, snow storms, cold snaps or what have you are all weather events that occur following statistical distributions in time and space. They are weather events and unattributable to anything but the state of the atmosphere in the (relatively brief) time before they are observed.
Does that make it more clear?
Also, and I've basically said it above, global warming or climate change does not mean we won't have cold winters any more! Even though people perceived 2008 as being cold in many northern latitude countries it is still one of the top ten warmest years ever observed.
Because the net atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone up 40% over the last century or so. That's a very significant change, and it's basically all due to human activity. In the laboratory, it is more than enough to cause significant greenhouse warming.
As for the rest of your argument: "Although natural sources represent most CO2 emissions, they do not contribute to the recent observed increase in concentrations because natural sources are balanced by natural sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The increase in carbon dioxide concentration arises because the increase from human activity is not completely balanced by a corresponding sink." -- USG via Wikipedia
If you disbelieve scientists who are, individually and collectively, vastly better informed about every climate issue than you are because...you read something on the internet...then you're a denier.
You probably want to stop reading Fox and Rush, esp. 14 years after their lies have been debunked: July/August 1994
The Way Things Aren't
Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
For about the billionth time on this site: It was only one or two articles in news magazines and a collection of scientifically ignorant journalists who were saying there was going to be another ice age. Global warming was well accepted even then. Which brings me to a more important question. Why do you constantly repeat such easily debunked falsehoods? You are like a creationist who still rants about the Piltdown Man or irreducible complexity.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
They had an entire crew killed on the launchpad on the very first go, and the crew of Apollo 13 were dumb-shit-lucky to make it back to earth. Six of the missions actually landed on the moon, out of SEVENTEEN missions (yes, a number were not designed to land on the moon, or even leave earth orbit.)
Even if you're exceptionally kind, NASA failed to reach the moon 1 in 7 tries.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't claim anything over the past ten years temperature have been *dropping* to the point now where we are now at 1980 temps. Also the readjustment of 'top world temps' that took place last year moved the hottest years
No they haven't. Either you are lying or you are an ignorant fool. And repeating doesn't make it so.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Why 1998? Is it because 1998 was an unusually warm year, making it an outlier? It's may be true to say that 1998 is the warmest year on record, but to use that to imply that the climate is now cooling off is simply wrong.
You may find this random chart off of Google handy:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/t1975.jpg