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New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
CO2 is a molecule, containing one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. One CO2 molecule is indistinguishable from another[*], so in principle no there is no test to determine whether any particular CO2 molecule coems from a fossil fuel or from another source.
The obvious thing to do however is to measure and estimate the amount of man-made CO2, by summing up the CO2 emitted by smoke stacks, agriculture, forest clearing etc. Given this, I don't think anyone denies that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere comes from any natural source. In fact, so far the inceases in CO2 in the atmosphere has been less than humans have been emitting, due to some natural carbon sinks. For example, small amounts of carbon (but huge on a planetary scale) get dissolved in the oceans. These sinks have limits though, when the natural carbon sinks start to saturate it will only make the problem worse.
[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.
[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.
Actually, you needn't look to such minute differences. Different isotopes do react at slightly different rates, so biological processes often enrich molecules in one isotope over another. I don't know of any way to use this to trace CO2's source, but it has been used to chemically trace the earliest appearances of photosynthesis on Earth, for example.
That said, your post is right: you can reasonably accurately measure and sum the man-made carbon sources.
You can measure the ratio of different types of carbon in tree rings.
What has been found is that 13C/12C ratios are the lowest they've been for 10000 years, and that there is a sharp decline starting in 1850.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
RJ Francey et al, Tellus 51B, pp.170-193, 1999
It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes. We do not know how much methane hydrate there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release. There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.
Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.
Yes, in the past, the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lagged behind temperature increases. But that does not mean that an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide cannot cause an increase in temperatures now. After all, digging up billions of tons of fossil fuels and burning them is not something that has happened in the past. And we know it's not an increase in solar output causing the warming we've observed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What makes him think that since the measurement method is unreliable for the last 20 years, it is reliable for the rest of the time period hundreds of years back? It throws his entire theory out of the window. He is doing specious reasoning by cherry picking the results that fit his theory better.
That's not what we "learned." The information coming from the hacked emails is ambiguous at worst and probably tells us nothing more than that scientists are humans. There's no serious evidence of falsifying data. If you believe there is, out with it, please.
// This is not a sig.
The prediction of an increase in concentration in carbon dioxide predates the 1970s. Arrhenius first predicted it in the 19th century. That's why Keeling started measuring the concentration on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 1950s. In 1979, the Jason Committee predicted a doubling in the concentration of carbon dioxide and a warming of several degrees Celsius by 2035. At this point, we have decades of data confirming these predictions.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Or it might be because it already hit the front page on Friday:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/20/1747257
+1 informative. Next question:
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Look at the data.
Here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png,
or here
or here.
Examine the data, and get back to me with the answer to this question: based on the data (and not on the opinions of some pundit telling you what to think), would you personally sign on to a statement that the global average temperate is dropping?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Some emails were leaked on Friday from the climate research unit at the university of East Anglia. In about 150 megabytes of text, it turned out that in one of the emails, one of the researchers used the word 'trick' to describe some unspecified method of statistical analysis he had used on some dataset, and mentioned that it would 'hide the decline'. Everyone immediately saw that obviously this trick was dishonest and the decline in question was a real decline in temperatures, and it means that the entire field of climate science has been perpetrating a decades-long hoax on the world, and Al Gore should be tried for treason. Because you don't need any kind of context to know exactly what the word 'trick' refers to and what 'decline' is being hidden and why; your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know.
That's why articles about climate change can expect to be tagged with such things for quite some time into the future.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What computer modeling has added is that there are not subtle effects that were not in the simpler models that will significantly alter the warming. For example, it has been hypothesized that certain types of clouds will cancel out most of the warming, or that other types of clouds will cause even more warming that previously predicted. The newest models and data show that the previous predictions are pretty accurate.
As far as your assertion that these models are untested, you completely wrong. These models have predicted warming for over a century, and we've been seeing that warming since the 1970s. We have decades of evidence that confirm the models. The fact that people continue to say the models are "untested" is why we need to have more stories about the matter.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How about http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8233632.stm
Or maybe http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=a5LmlZgQzoPQ&refer=australia
And http://www.azocleantech.com/details.asp?newsID=3740
Then there is http://ecobridge.org/content/g_evd.htm#Disintegration
Also http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/29/coral-reefs-glue.html
Of course there is also the http://www.coral.org/resources/about_coral_reefs/threats_to_coral_reefs
I could go on, but I have a feeling that it still wouldn't convince you. Global Warming is not a myth. True, the Earth does go through cycles. I don't dispute that. However, the rate of climate change is far faster than previous cyclic rates. The rate now versus that of the pre-industrial age is much, much faster. The global ecology cannot adapt fast enough to the change. What used to take thousands of years now takes hundreds, and increasingly, decades. There is plenty of research all around to find. Pretty much the only studies that disagree with the idea of global warming are those that are done by the oil companies and their allies.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Yes. But then I'm looking at this chart: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
And this chart shows the Earth is at its coldest point in the last 500 million years:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How does it stand to reason?
Methane and cyanogen levels were enormously higher during the immediate post Hadean era, and remained somewhat high all the way to the precambrian. Does that say anything about modern life-forms tolerances for Cyanide? Oxygen levels were lower in the Cambrian, does that mean that modern life could get by just fine on 11% atmospheric O2? They reached 24% or so during the Jurassic. Does that mean modern forests wouldn't have massive wildfire problems if they rose that high again in your lifetime?
If you're going to throw around nebulous terms such as "the past" and "higher", don't you think you should know how long in the past, or how much higher, before you try to reason about it.
Who is John Cabal?
# Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
# Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
# Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".(1075403821)
# Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
from here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
It hasn't.
It is highly questionable whether this "pause" is even real. It does show up to some extent (no cooling, but reduced 10-year warming trend) in the Hadley Center data, but it does not show in the GISS data, see Figure 1. There, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 C per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 C per decade - just as predicted by IPCC as response to anthropogenic forcing.*
According to the GISS data (which takes the polar temperatures into consideration) the decadal trend over 1998-2009 is +0.19C! In light of the fact that the largest increases in temperatures have been observed at the poles, can you understand how a methodology which ignores polar temperatures might not give an accurate global picture of warming?
More importantly do you understand why your question, were it even true, is largely meaningless? If you don't yet understand that comparing the temperatures over a very few of the hottest decades on record (the 1990s and 2000s) has no significant bearing over a record stretching back a century and a half, I suggest you compare the last two decades to the 1890s and 1900s.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
Sadly the science tells us that is extrememly unlikely happen. But even if it did, world leaders should respond by accepting the advice of those who understand the statistical significance of any observed falls in trends as against the entire instrumental record. Perhaps you should work at gaining some such understanding yourself?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke