Slashdot Mirror
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."
How do they know if the CO2 is from fossil fuels or from natural sources, is there actually a test for this?
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
For many years to come one will wonder if the data presented to support claims such as this has been "tricked" to conform to someone's belief instead of representing reality.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008
You have *got* to be kidding me? What about all this emissions stuff they've been strapping to my engine?
Those crappy "Eco-Friendly" disposable cups and cutlery my employer's been stocking up on?
The recycled-paper-everything?
The ethanol they've put in my gas?
Those tiny cars I have to dodge around the highways?
All this has been for naught?
To hell with the hippies and their soy meat, time to go light some tires on fire or something....
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
For those to lazy to multiply, that's a 10.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in the mean global temperature.
Sounds pretty alarming.
jdb2
I sort of believe in climate change, but at this point in time, a day after we all got to learn that the top-institute for climate-change knowingly and willingly changed the numbers, lied... I can not take this serious. First I want to know how much has been fabricated and lied. After that, I might support this type of research again, but only after all the liars are banned from 'research'.
that the weather forecast is always right.
Oh wait, I thought it was supposed to be raining today?!?
All the emissions stuff they have strapped to your engine are to control particulate emissions. The combustion, or the operation of the engine itself, is what they are after. IF anything, cleaning up the soot from your engine probably made asthma sufferers worse and also increased the planetary temperature because nature can deal with larger particulates better than it can the really tiny aerosols. So basically, in order to be able to have motive power and not have all of our buildings and trees stained black, we've torched the planet. The hippies screwed up, but so did we.
Woops.
This is my sig.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/20/cru_climate_hack/
Relevant to this story.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
IF the forecast temperature rise is 6C per century, then it is .6C per decade
Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Assuming linear interpolation. I think you may well be on your own there.
They DO report a current trend of .15K per decade. This is far lower than the forecast.
Is there some reason you picked the Channel TLT data and not the, say, Channel TLS data which reports a negative 0.325 K/decade?
I'm no expert in any of this but the site you linked to seems to be satellite data for atmospheric temperatures. Not temperatures at the surface (which is really what we're concerned about, right? I have no doubt that the average temperature of the entire atmosphere of the earth has changed minimally -- if not been lowered erratically. The effects of what is happening on the ground are severely diluted when you include such a large volume.
Tell me, if you wanted to measure the temperature outside your house, would you consult a satellite measuring microwave transmissions or a thermometer adjacent to your house?
My work here is dung.
Apply heat to a glass of ice and the temperature will continue read 0 degrees C until all the ice has turned to water. That doesn't mean there's more energy (heat) in the system.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
nor to the statistician modifying data values.
We think it might be the multiple of a groat, furlong and an acre foot.
I wonder whether there is correlation between those who still use Fahrenheit exclusively and those who pretend that there is no such thing as man made climate change...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
but it is a negative feedback, do some research.
Is there some reason you picked the Channel TLT data and not the, say, Channel TLS data which reports a negative 0.325 K/decade?
The TLT channel is for lower troposphere and it is, indeed, the closest to ground level.
Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings. Indeed, one of the great points of criticism made about global climate is weather or not the current level state of ground measuring statements is both consistent and accurate. I'd assume that they are not.
The satellite, because it is the same instrument and same methodology, is consistent, and so in my lay opinion, is the more reliable source of information when considering global climate trends.
This is my sig.
It's even better - the source cited in the story above is the CRU (funny how "University of East Anglia" started being the source when everyone found out that CRU was more than a bit corrupt) - the same people who just got busted with all of that leaked data and incriminating emails just this week.
So they apparently decided to double down on their predictions, instead of trying to pretend nothing happened - but hiding the provenance.
Anyone want to bet the lead author on the paper wasn't the lead author last week, and got "promoted" when the real researchers' names were tainted?
Yes, and that's 0.06 per year or 0.06/365 per day. Sorry, but your "test" is simply not credible at all. There will always be natural variation on top of everything else.
This is complete rubbish. Carbon has 3 naturally occuring isotopes. There are differences based on the ratio of carbon isotopes.
If this refers to the 'triks' dug out in private mails from so-called hack in the mailsystem of CRU -which actually shows signs of an inside job-, check the response at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/ . Hint: quotemining.
See my previous reply. True, I had completely forgotton about isotopes. But I'm doubtful that you could turn this into a useful test of atmosphereic CO2 composition. Even if you can, does anyone argue about the source anyway? I don't see anyone arguing this point.
It is not linear, which was the point. A temperature change over a century is not necessarily proportional to a temperature change over a decade within that century. The temperature change of two decades in that century are not necessarily equal.
Palm trees and 8
Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
I suggest everyone reads about ClimateGate (http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d21-ClimateGate-emails-provide-unwanted-scrutiny-of-climate-scientists) and then provides his/her own
analysis that fits best with what you believe.
Science has become politics and hence can not be trusted anymore.
As to why etc. I'll leave that to some else.
The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010. "
Interesting that a historically rather serious recession can only cause a small decrease. It seems like cutting CO2 back to the levels needed to stop global warming would require or cause a much more serious recession.
In fact it's very noticable that now everyone is worried about a 30's style global depression pretty much everyone has stopped talking about cutting CO2 emissions in a follow up to Kyoto.
Not that Kyoto cut CO2 of course
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol#Increase_in_greenhouse_gas_emission_since_1990
World CO2 emissions went up by 38% from 1992 to 2007. The US refused to sign, India and China were exempt and in the EU
As of year-end 2006, the United Kingdom and Sweden were the only EU countries on pace to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010. While UN statistics indicate that, as a group, the 36 Kyoto signatory countries can meet the 5% reduction target by 2012, most of the progress in greenhouse gas reduction has come from the stark decline in Eastern European countries' emissions after the fall of communism in the 1990s
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
'Climate models predict disaster' is not news. Climate model always predict disaster.
'1999 climate model validated by 10 years of actual data'. *That* would be news.
I can't help but wonder why this report surfaced just before the Copenhagen talks.
It's almost like someone was trying to influence the outcome of those talks by dropping in a really dire prediction of the results if the talks didn't come out the way they wanted them to.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The methane clathrates are melting and methane is actually bubbling up in places in the oceans. One notable source is north of Japan.
As the oceans warm, that rate of release also increases.
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.
Great analogy, but you wanted to say:
That doesn't mean there's not more energy (heat) in the system.
A predicted 6 degrees Celsius rise in a century? Oh, how scary! Let's introduce onerous carbon-curbing measures.
But wait, the models that make these predictions all have CO2 as the driving factor behind climate change. The historical record shows, however, that the atmospheric CO2 concentration follows changes in global temperature instead of leads it. Not surprising: higher temperature -> oceans heat up -> less dissolved CO2.
Moreover, there is a perfectly plausible alternative explanation for what is causing the rapid climate fluctuations (historically going both up and down on a fairly short timescale): the sun. If you include the EUV and X-Ray bands of the spectrum, it becomes obvious that the sun's output changes much more than it is being given credit for: http://www.usc.edu/dept/space_science/sem_data/SEM%20Data%20Graphs/SEM_1996-2009.jpg
There was no lying. People who already doubt the results pull a sentence out of context, demand that we all forget normal idiomatic uses of English words in that sentence, and then claim that it is an indication of falsified data. That is all, nothing to see here, move along.
Palm trees and 8
20 million tons generates approximately 0.5 degrees of cooling when in the upper atmosphere.
We'd have to loft 240 million tons of SO2, which could buy us time to clean up the CO2
Of course one would want some safety measure in case an actual volcano erupted.
So loft 200 tons.
Hot sulfuric acid and copper shavings, you could make it at home.
I have a couple of issues with the article (actually more, but this is for starters...)
1. If the vast majority of increases is due to Chinese economic expansion, why are we targeting USA and EU for further cuts in emissions...ever heard of Pareto's law? Oh, yeah...the point of the Copenhagen meeting is to extract more wealth from the "rich" nations to give to the poor dictatorships...
2. If the melting of all the polar ice is going to occur, and sea levels will rise that much, seems to me the "highly desirable" location of the British Isles will be underwater...or is it going to preferentially not rise there? I note the cover of Algore's new book which was photoshopped to add four hurricanes (one of which is rotating the wrong direction) and the polar ice cap all "melted" in spite of snow and ice cover in extreme northern Canada, and finally Cuba completely submerged...(can't believe Algore would do that to his commie buddies)
How stupid do they think we are?
Karma be damned...
:/
I've submitted the 'Climategate' story twice (1, 2, and it gets pushed down in the firehose. Why? It has "hackers", tech, science, controversy... All the ingredients of a good topic. So - why vote it *down*?
It's evident there is a 'leftwards' lean in a large part (if not the majority) of the subscribers of this site. So what does the unwillingness to discuss this story indicate - Denial? Suppression? A real 'inconvenient truth'? I don't know. Seems to me that it is a great Slashdot story, but here as elsewhere, certain partisans are doing what they can to make science more and more just an arm of politics and their particular belief system. That sickens me.
I think objectivity should be THE concern when it comes to an issue which is potentially as important as this one, where the stakes are so high. Not so, apparently, among a majority of other Slashdotters.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Then maybe England and Sweden will be able to resume their wine production as they did before the Medieval ice age.
Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings.
Sigh.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
And if using the one at your house, would you put the thermometer in the middle of the driveway, or right where the heat pump blasts out the exchange air? Wouldn't make sense to do that, would it?
Nonetheless, that is exactly the kind of environment where a lot of the Surface Stations are located. Makes me question the data...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYLmLW4k4aI yes, all that. and then our magical input with just a few parts of a million.
>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
And I can find a study that says the world will be colder in a century. It all depends on the agenda I want to push.
Why do people use the term Global Warming. It is a misleading term that does not properly identify what is happening to our planet. The fact is that the atmosphere is variable and will continue to fluctuate in terms of average temperature.
:)
The real problem we are facing is rising sea TEMPERATURES. Here's just one technical article that studies the effects of rising sea temperatures on phytoplankton on Australia's coastline: http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m394p001.pdf If you search the http://www.int-res.com/ site you'll find a lot more really technical research articles that are great reads if you like this stuff
Rising sea temperatures mess up the sea currents and make fish search out better habitats (or die), perhaps because of the rising temperature itself, or maybe because their food supply is damaged (due to phytoplankton dieoff). If something doesn't change soon, we are in danger of losing vast populations in the ocean. This will have huge repercussions on our global food supply.
In the end, it doesn't matter if we are the ones causing it, or the sun is. Who cares. It is a complex system, and you can prove, through science, that carbon emissions directly affect sea temperatures. Maybe it's miniscule. Maybe it's not, but we have to do something or we are in severe danger of entirely losing our oceans.
Imagine if the seafood industry went belly up. It would cause a worldwide depression the likes of which we have not seen or dreamed of, especially for areas that depend heavily on the ocean for their nation's food supply.
AT THE VERY LEAST, if we are not going to reduce carbon emissions or whatever we can to reduce the effect on oceans, we need to have an actionable plan for what to do once the oceans die. Because it will happen if this trend continues. Having a plan doesn't mean it's going to be used, but we need to be able to continue functioning as a species if it does!
Honestly, i don't get the 'hoax' tag, the doom&gloom tag or even fear mongering could be seen as appropriate, but hoax?
Based on the knowledge we have, there isglobal warming going on, you can argue all you want, but temperatures are going up regardless of what you say about that.
However, these are conclusions based on our limited knowledge of the world & how it's climate works completely, it's possible that global warming is part of a normal cycle, it's possible it's due to sun output (although very unlikely, we should've detected that already), and yes, it's possible that mankind is contributing to the problem.
Given that we have measured & observed temperature rise, and given that we know pollution & CO2 emissions have a negative effect on the climate, why shouldn't we do our best to limit both pollution & emissions? Regardless of the question if we are solely to blame for the problem?
Hell, it's the air we breathe in, the water we drink, and the food we eat, why do we as a species insist on 'peeing in the pool we drink from'?
" ...
Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide
Corinne Le Quéré, Michael R. Raupach, Josep G. Canadell, Gregg Marland et al.24
Abstract ..."
Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This can only be achieved through a drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions. Yet fossil fuel emissions increased by 29% between 2000 and 2008, in conjunction with increased contributions from emerging economies, from the production and international trade of goods and services, and from the use of coal as a fuel source. In contrast, emissions from land-use changes were nearly constant. Between 1959 and 2008, 43% of each year's CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere on average; the rest was absorbed by carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability. Changes in the CO2 sinks are highly uncertain, but they could have a significant influence on future atmospheric CO2 levels. It is therefore crucial to reduce the uncertainties.
Not a word in the abstract about 6 degrees of anything.
Why? It has "hackers", tech, science, controversy... All the ingredients of a good topic. So - why vote it *down*?
Having read your submissions, the fault, dear brutus, lies not in the stars but yourself. Your submissions are horribly written.
Just because you are being shot down does not imply conspiracy, hard as that is to believe.
With current advancements in internet and virtual reality, maybe a way to stop polluting/emiting greenhouse gases and/or survive to global heathing is to attach ourselves to machines and live a virtual life there, with minimal energy requirements, low pollution, letting the planet heal itself. And tell the machines that guard us to tell anyone who asked that they are dominating and using us to generate energy to not blame the human architects that designed that brilliant plan.
The only problem could happen is if some idiots want to keep screwing our climate funding a polluting underground city and driving around ships, but we can build an alternate virtual reality s specifically for them, with gateways with the main one.
It sounds like you are suggesting that global warming is a matter of opinion. Why would people on the left want there to be global warming? If there were any compelling arguments against global warming I would celebrate (you would probably call me a leftie -- I am European).
It is also interesting that in almost all of the world, this issue doesn't have the political dimension it seems to have in the USA. Parties are discussing how to deal with global warming. The right wing generally wants do to slightly less, the left and greens more. But they all agree that this is a reality we need to do something about.
Or it might be because it already hit the front page on Friday:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/20/1747257
Really it's all negative? So when it gets warmer and the snow near the poles melt, reflecting less light and heating the earth, that's negative?
And when the permafrost melts on all the bogs over in old soviet and china territories, releasing tons of pent-up greenhouse gasses, that's negative?
Do some research.
You do realize that the location of these things is near building and stuff, so pretty much not representative of even local temperatures?
Yeah.. about that sigh of yours
"His name was James Damore."
For those who are interested in how climate change is being marketed, a while back I wrote a piece called "An Inconvenient Truth?" that is an analysis of some of the charts and diagrams in Al Gore's book and movie from an information design perspective. The bottom line is that Al Gore used every trick in the book to try to strengthen his case.
The recent CRU e-mails explain some some of the things I point out in the piece.
Yes, and while that's good in the short term, that's not a good thing in the long run. Why? Because the negative feedback pushes us back towards a lower temperature stable state for now. That means we see only limited changes for now. People think nothing is happening and don't change their behavior.
But at some point, we will be in the attractor for a different stable state, and then positive feedback will rapidly move us to a stable state at a higher temperature. That's mathematically and physically inevitable; the only unknown is the point at which that happens.
There's also likely to be hysteresis, meaning that we won't be able to get back to our current state easily.
Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings. Indeed, one of the great points of criticism made about global climate is weather or not the current level state of ground measuring statements is both consistent and accurate. I'd assume that they are not.
Indeed - the Heat Island Effect. Interestingly enough, this was the major premise of State of Fear, that the Heat Island Effect was causing much of the measured temperature gain - that it was being underestimated by climatologists, therefore resulting in perceived global warming.
Real Climate.org did a long blast on State of Fear, but interestingly enough, their response on the HIE was real weak, which essentially said "We know about it and are already compensating for it". Well, yes... he said so. Why not just ignore stations within heat islands entirely (like he did in several charts)? RC.org's response? Silence. And moderation of comments asking that question, too, interestingly enough. They like a little bit of criticism on the site, but not a lot. (Even if you ask it as nicely as I just did.)
Michael Crichton also theorizes there is peer pressure in the field to keep global warming dissent out of peer reviewed journals. ("Preposterous!" Real Climate.org claimed.) Of course, with the Climategate emails leaked out, we now see compelling proof that Crichton was actually right on the money with this - with a climate journal which promoted a single GW skeptic to the editorial board being pressured to fire him, and lacking that, for everyone to boycott the journal, take their papers elsewhere, and to refuse to cite any articles in that journal.
It's all very interesting. I find RC.org informative, though obviously biased - when a British judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth could be shown in classrooms, but only with a teacher guide explaining that it is a polemic, NOT a documentary, RC.org conveniently left out this latter bit, making it appear Al Gore was completely vindicated in the courtroom.
I'm giving a guest lecture on global warming next week, and used mainly RC.org, in conjunction with a mix of Green and government information sources to prepare the lecture.
"World leaders" are puppets of their various central banksters and traders. I think this is beyond obvious now, not even debatable. Now those guys *want* carbon credits trading, it is a way for them to make huge sums gambling without doing any actual work themselves, and being bankrolled by everyone else who *are* working, (about the same as now, just a new direction and game to play).. They tell the "world leaders" the tradeoff for getting them this new lucrative game is they get a slew more laws to pass to use over the heads of their serfs and subjects.
So, to answer your question "And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?"..they will ignore it if this happens, say it is just a temporary condition, etc. Because they want and are getting those credits for the new market, plus they want even more centralized power.
note: the above has nothing to do with any scientific reality of ratio from naturally occurring co2 or "man made", etc, or the climate, I'm not making this a stance one way or the other on the subject, just saying what will happen with the world leaders. Climate change is irrelevant to the two top new things they-"they" being the puppets and their puppet masters- *always* want, more money and more power.
Right, I also found http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm which contains a good explanation of isotopic measurements of atmospheric carbon.
Yeah, it's easy to put stupid ideas into your opponents mouth and attack them.
You can drive whatever car you like for all I care. But you better compensate the rest of us if you damage our mutual environment. That has nothing to do with control and all to do with common sense. Unfortunate as it may be, this world isn't big enough for everyone to do as they please. Had we been 10 million humans we probably could, but now we are 6.8 billion.
As for Al Gore, he hasn't been relevant over here. Except indirectly in being "the guy that opened the eyes of many Americans". If he makes money out of it, good for him. I can only hope he puts them to good use.
If you look at the temperature from outer sky you might measure the heat emission from earth to outer space. The higher the temperature, the higher the heat emission. If a greenhouse effect is effective, it reduces the heat emission and thus the temperature. In this scenario there would be a lower temperature in the upper atmospheric region as long as until a new equilibrium is reached, with higher temperatures at the surface of the earth.
Why would people on the left want there to be global warming?
Because left-wing ideology, from Marx and Mussolini to the present day, is about State control and limits on individual freedom. Irrespective of their accuracy, the theories of AGW are an excuse for a State power grab, complete with the introduction of new taxes and new laws to control how we all live.
You remember the Patriot Act and how most of us didn't like it? AGW laws are similar: created on equally specious grounds, and with the identical aim of removing our freedoms and strengthening the state.
Let me add, AGW does have a political dimension here in Europe, but big media does not report dissenting (skeptical) views. Big media sides with Government propaganda, especially in Britain, where the Government is constantly broadcasting commercials with our tax money: "Act on CO2" or the Green God will flood this land and drown your puppies and kittens. No, seriously.
By the way - no amount of steel wool will clean the image of that video from your retinas. It's wonderful and terror inducing at the same time.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm not sure why this was modded "insightful". The assumption isn't whether it's linear or non-linear, it's whether feedbacks are net positive or negative. There are reasons to believe they are negative and that the models are wrong. There is no evidence for the kind of strong positive feedback this prediction requires. Indeed positive feedbacks are rare in nature, exhibiting as they do greater instability. But anyway, the idea that this "complex feedback cycle" is understood well enough to provide any predictive power through modelling is, to be frank, laughable. Karma be damned indeed ;).
For the record, realclimate is run by one of the very people with emails in the liberated data, and he is very very worried.
"His name was James Damore."
but it is a negative feedback, do some research.
but there are many negative and positive feedbacks, . . .
Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
So it can be an exponential function, whatever, but you can either give me intermediate steps of some kind between now and 6C, perhaps by year, or certainly by decade, or you cannot. If you cannot, then quit trying to pretend that 6C actually means something because it means your number is crap. If you want me to believe in it, then that's fine, but you are making a religious argument, not a scientific one. Science is for things that you can test, and the moment you told me you cannot test 6C, you told me that it wasn't science.
This is my sig.
It has been a front page story already. After all, we wouldn't want any dupes
Warming rates are projected to increase over time as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, for obvious reasons; the 21st century average rate is not the same as the current rate. The 6 C by 2100 projections are the product of very large emissions projections toward the end of the century. Current warming projections are for about 0.2K/decade, IIRC.
Virtually everyone admits that temperatures have increased substantially over the last ~100 years. The entire point of these reconstructions is to demonstrate that this rise is unprecedented over the past ~2K years and follows a certain pattern. If the same methods on the same species of tree in the same area in the same study not only fail to accurately replicate the thermometer record over the last several decades but also actually diverge substantially, this calls into question the entire pursuit.
In other words, if your methodology suggests that it couldn't have been warmer from 0 BC to 1900 because tree rings were not statistically larger, but the rings actually fail to increase as predicted in recent history when we know it has warmed, then this strongly indicates that we also cannot rely on warmer past temperatures to be accurately reflected in increased tree ring size either. Of course you can speculate that pollution may be playing a role, but it is still just speculation and there are better documented conclusions one could draw from this, e.g., that tree rings do not correlate linearly with temperature, that changes in moisture content, sunshine, CO2, etc play an equally large role, etc.
Good non-politicized science should: pick a methodology; show how it correlates with the actual thermometer record; then document it clearly for better or worse over the entire course, i.e., actually show the divergence (and make the data and methods available for all for review). These so-called "scientists" actually went to the other extreme by trying to hide the divergence and present a view that was not supported by their actual research. Many of these same scientists have gone further still by refusing reasonable requests for the raw data and further information on their methods.
This is politicized "science" at its very worst.
TLS is the lower stratosphere, which is not where we live. (We don't live in the entire lower troposphere, either, but its average temperature trend is much closer to the surface trend than is anything which happens in the stratosphere.)
Note, by the way, that an enhanced greenhouse effect predicts lower tropospheric warming and lower stratospheric cooling. Which is in fact what is observed.
Nonetheless, that is exactly the kind of environment where a lot of the Surface Stations [surfacestations.org] are located. Makes me question the data...
Or not even that. It could be that 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, nobody really gave a shit about making the measurement super accurate because it didn't need to be at that time. It kinda needed be in the ballpark, so if it was off, who really cared. Now people are looking at the data and cooking it in a bunch of different ways to try and make it "good", with statistical tools, but sometimes, when you are giving a dead guy CPR, he's gonna stay dead. The only thing we have that's credible and consistent is the satellite. Woodshole plunging a thermometer into a bucket of water it pulled from the ocean or a guy with a thermometer attached to his shed just doesn't cut it any more.
This is my sig.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet...how can they say the temperature is going to rise 6C based on these CO2 levels? Do they have a working simulation of the global climate?
Yes.
This is a complicated problem, but it turns out that it is one amenable to numerical integration. There are now very good simulations.
(As there should be. A lot of people have been working on this at a lot of different institutions for a long time, and computers are just getting better and better.)
As far as I know, they don't even have conclusive evidence that CO2 causes warming yet.
Sure there is. The fundamental physics is known, and has been known (and not controversial) for a century. There has been some controversy about how much-- this needs to be calculated numerically, incorporating all the feedback loops-- but the basic fact that carbon dioxide causes warming is not controversial (in fact, it's well proven on other planets, not just Earth).
The global climate is far too complex to predict to that degree of accuracy,
No, it's not. You just need enough nodes in the simulation. All of the fundamental physics is well known.
especially when we're adding factors to it that can't be modeled based on historical trends.
The infrared absorption (and emission) properties of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, are experimentally measured. This is physics, not history.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well, you can. Fossil fuel has (nearly) no C14, as C14 is generated in the atmosphere and decays quickly. Fossil fuel has very little C13, as biological processes in most plants prefer C12 to C13, and fossil fuels are created from previous animal (i.e. recycled plant) and plant matter. Yes, the total carbon flux is much bigger than the human contribution, but we can measure isotope ratios very precisely. This was predicted and measured quite a while before global warming became a significant concern, as it also puts C14 ages off if not corrected for. See Suess effect, named after the chemist who described this in the 1950s.
Stephan
Missed it then, obviously, but am glad to see that it did make the front page.
Thanks for pointing that out.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
My population model shows that in 100 years, 98% of everyone on earth right now will be dead. Obviously, we need to stop all human activity before this event!
The thing is, there's no 'scientific consensus' to support the idea of a feedback cycle magnifying the CO2 greenhouse effect by that much. When people talk about scientific consensus, look at the questions they've ask scientists. The scientific consensus basically amounts to the fact that CO2 in the atmosphere has an effect on global temperatures. There is no consensus on many other things that are claimed.
Even if you look at what these guys are actually claiming, they didn't actually say that the earth is on track to rise 6 degrees in the next century. What they actually said was that society is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that some people (IPCC) predicted would cause a rise of 6 degrees. They didn't affirm that the IPCC prediction was correct in any way. It's sneaky language.
Getting back to your point, Richard Lindzen, a climate professor at MIT, claims that there is a diminishing feedback effect, in which adding CO2 to the atmosphere has a cumulatively smaller effect the more you add. He also claims that there is no evidence for a 'tipping point' where warming rapidly increases, and that in fact the evidence suggest there will be no tipping points. He shows that most climate simulations have been based on assumptions that have turned out to be false.
Now, you may disagree on his conclusions and points, and that's ok, that is science, we can debate it; but at least he is making actual points instead of making a bunch of noise that amounts to nothing.
Qxe4
No, I'm not saying the environment is mine. I'm saying it is ours.
By your logic, it would be ok for me to for example dump toxic waste in a river. Hey, it's my environment as well! Why are we not dumping toxic waste? That's right, because it would be incredibly stupid. It makes no difference if one person does it, but if everyone uses the same logic we are all dead.
As long as we share the environment I am going to insist that we find rules to use it on equal terms without destroying it.
If you live in a society what you do affects others, and you're going to have to adapt to some degree. Deal with it.
If you live in a society what you do affects others, and you're going to have to adapt to some degree. Deal with it.
We plan on it. There's more than one way to settle a territorial dispute.
This is my sig.
If you don't think it's real, what did bleach all the coral then? Why is that entire country sinking into the sea and buying other land to move to? Magic? The new Twilight movie? This is the same idiotic non-believer crap as the "we didn't land on the moon" theory. Hey, get out your telescope, look up at the moon, and see the laser-bouncing we put there. How did it get there? Hmmmm.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Yeah, but it's an assumption used by climate scientists that combine a predicted exponential increase in CO2 with logarithmic response in temperature.
Anything less than exponential increase in CO2 actually implies sub-linear increases in temperature with respect to time.
Oh, and that's assuming the theory is even correct.
Depends how you define the decade. If you define the decade as 2000 to 2009, some of it has happened in 2009 instead of after 2009.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think you are misrepresenting left-wing ideology, but I'm sure someone else can give you a better response to that than I since I don't consider myself particularly left oriented.
Regardless, the emission trading being implemented in Europe is designed to limit our freedoms as little as possible and focuses right on the problem. Cap the total emission levels and let people trade with certificates (using the market handle allocation and costs). You can still drive your huge car, but if it emits a lot of fossilized carbon you'll pay for it accordingly (indirectly through the petrol cost). Run it on electricity and you pay nothing.
The government has no control at all other than setting the cap, which is exactly the one thing we should decide democratically.
The only problem is they set the initial cap so high above the actual emission levels that the price for carbon emissions dropped to zero.
Really? Please show me where "aging liberal hippie douches" are blocking Solar Farms or WInd farms. So far, about the ones that I have seen blocking these are those opposed to AE (under a pretext of caring about the environment). Now, a small minority do object to individual projects, but that is about certain locations. In general, the vast majority of the protesters against these projects are ppl like you; AC that lie.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The global ecosystem getting out of balance, causing mass extinction of species (which probably would include the humans). Mass extinctions have occured naturally in the past, and usually there's no known external event (the end of the dinosaurs is an exception), so it's certainly something which in the worst case would happen.
Now this certainly wouldn't mean the end of life on earth. But it might be the end of humans on earth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Would that be because almost all of this decade was after 2000? Who comes up with these brilliant insights, I wonder.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Rockoon, yes he is actually spending a lot of time on clarifying the issue against a shitload of thugs like you that try to distract us from the real problem.
Given the happenings of the past couple of days, I think it is pertinent at least at this time for the University of Anglia to release the data that was used in the study and the algorithm used to calculate the 6c/century figures. Let independent scientists verify that the algorithm actually works and does give the purported result.
Or are we still expected to believe the 6c figures because they said so?
Yeah... I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one. That outcast is way beyond the capability of the climatemodels we have today.
I thought we were running out of coal and oil. Won't the problem sort of solve it's self once that happens?
"India is in the same boat (though it really is about bringing their ppl up to a higher standard, not about being a superpower)"
a problem with this statement is that according to "An Inconvenient Truth", the CO2 emissions per capita, and even on a total basis in India are much lower that those of the US
IIRC, there was a difference of 10 times in the per capita emissions b/w US and India
Ideally, shouldnt all the countries have similar per capita emissions??
US should reduce theirs to Indian levels and then help India to use the same tech it used (possibly with the sharing of research costs, maybe not) to increase the standard of living here without impacting the CO2 levels..
I am using India and US as examples cause they are the only 2 I remember from the film, as US was one of the highest emitters, and India one of the lowest.
same can be applied for other countries having a large diff. in CO2 o/p
Warming rates are projected to increase over time as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, for obvious reasons;
But they can't, because there's not enough shit to burn.
This is my sig.
Yeah, see also Michael Chrichton's novel "State of Fear", wherein he presents that argument.
Understandably though in my opinion, because where government grants exist, there will be people conniving to take advantage of them. Where there is any money to be made, there will be people climbing over each other to get the most. However, this doesn't mean that the message is invalid! It just means that some people are greedy..
I welcome the return of the Mesozoic temperatures. A worldwide reptile paradise.
And no greedy people in the fossil fuel industry? There's boatloads more money there, so that's where any thinking greedy person would go.
And almost everyone who says "but it's been hotter before" miss this crucial point. Thank you.
If you are reading this, then you are probably under 45 years old.
I think the average life expectancy is rising - currently 75 years old or so in most Western countries - for men.
But more importantly medicine is going through an exponential increase in its abilities. It hasn't yet reached microprocessor rates of doubling every 18 months, but we certainly have learned more in about the last 20 or 30 years about how the human body works than we learned in all of history before that.
This strongly suggests that the average life expectancy will start rising exponentially too, with a lag to account for the development of applications from the basic discoveries.
So it is not unreasonable to expect some of you reading this to live to 150, barring any nasty accidents. And that means that climate change will have a direct impact on your life. You may have to live through mass starvation, wars fought over resources like water, extinction of once common species and the rise of diseases once only found in the tropics.
So, whether or not it's a totally proven phenomenon is irrelevant - _you_ personally can't afford to act as if it is unproven: you need to take personal action now, in the hope that it will help to mitigate the consequences.
We as a species need to learn the lessons of all the previous civilisations that have managed to extinguish themselves through resource starvation; don't spend time arguing that it may not be happening - act as if it is while hoping that it's not. Definitely carrying on with research at the same time. Maybe we will show that it's not happening, and that would be fantastic, but we can't wait for that.
Unlike Hadley, RSS uses satellite data, is consistent, and is open. They DO report a current trend of .15K per decade. This is far lower than the forecast.
I got the impression that the forecast is assuming that economic growth will lead to higher greenhouse emissions in later years, and accelerating temperature increases. So current trends not matching a simple linear path to their endpoint doesn't really mean much.
Oops, the end of the sentence should of course have been: "... in 2000 instead of after 2000."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So it is not unreasonable to expect some of you reading this to live to 150, barring any nasty accidents.
You do realize that there are health and life insurance industries that will do everything they can to prevent this?
They're not going to increase without limit forever, but there certainly is enough remaining fossil fuel for CO2 to increase beyond today's levels, and thus for warming rates to accelerate.
Mass extinctions have occured naturally in the past, and usually there's no known external event (the end of the dinosaurs is an exception)
Ah yes, that class of animals that had large bulky bodies, ate huge amounts of food, and had relatively small brains with primitive instincts... No wonder they were vulnerable to extinction.
Oh, I got carried away -- you were talking about the dinosaurs, not humans.
I can't see any wizards, gnomes or similar in them. Did you perhaps mean Science Fiction?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, there are boatloads of greedy people there already and the competition is harder. As with any business, find yourself a niche and occupy it well
The first chart is nice, but it tells only a litte, because we don't have an absolute scale. It shows an increase, but I'd rather like to see it unnormalized - on the *Kelvin* scale, I might add.
Fact: Celsius and Fahrenheit are convenience units only, because they cannot show any ratio at all. A room temperature of 20 degrees Celsius is NOT the double of 10 degrees Celsius. Boiling water (1 liter at 100 C) does not contain 5 times the energy of the same amount of water at room temperature (1 l at 20C) - this is often overlooked when using Celsius or Fahrenheit based units.
Since the graph shown is normalized but conspicously omits its average or center. Now I assume the world average temperature is somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 degrees Celsius, but the exact value doesn't really matter as we will see right now.
We have a delta-t = 1 Kelvin with a base average of t-0 = [258; 268] K over a solid 100 years. If the world temperature average was 258 Kelvin in 1880, it is 259 Kelvin in 2000.
Fact: That means we have, on average, a temperature increase of 1K per 100 years, or an increase of 0,39 percent over ONE HUNDRED years.
Fact: Every year, the temperature rose on average 0.01K or 0.0039 percent.
Fact: Temperature differences of less than 0.01 K require very sensitive equipment to be measured correctly.
Question: did we had such sensitive equipment deployed worldwide back in 1880 or in 1960?.
Fact: For the age 1880 to 1960, all temperature gauges had to be read optically and written down manually.
Error range estimate: assuming we had 200 worldwide temperature stations with each of them submitting 365 daily averages to be computed into one year's average. (for a limited temperature station coverage in 1880-1960, before mass production of electronics made that point moot) - so we get 73'000 temperature values to calculate the yearly average temperature.
Let's imagine that out of 73000 temperature readings only 3 values were only 1 degree Celsius off. The person reading the temperature scale made an error and incorrectly reported 21 degrees when the true daily average was 20 degrees.
If we have 3 erroneous readings out of 73000, the error is 50% higher than the assumed increase in global temperature.
73000 readings throughout one year, distributed around the globe, done by lab assistants, students using whatever equipment they have. I would be highly suprised if more than 70000 of them are within a 1 degree range of errors.
So we have another
Fact: for all years up until around 1960, the margin of error is at least 50% higher than the presumed signal.
Only one single reading being off only one single degree could account for half the yearly's supposed temperature increase. With the signal being equal to an of 2 degree error in 73000 readings, all statistical and scientific results are to take with a very large grain of salt.
A temperature increase of 0.01K is probably less than the radiated body heat of a small bird resting somewhere near the sensor.
Well at least I think.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Consider this result, and the data it references. A few rogue emails are just noise, not signal.
The result in the Nature letter, which I recall appearing in some other form a few years earlier, is the first information that made me go "oh shit" -- it's based on a long record of observations designed to minimize local effects, and it shows both CO2 increase, and evidence of warming. (And the whole crowd that's blathering on about water vapor and solar cycles and failure to measure X-rays and Mars and Jupiter -- sorry, that's been looked at, you guys are nuts and seriously in denial. Most of this shit can be checked with a few mouse clicks nowadays.)
This is rubbish. The numerical problem is confounded by the gridded nature of most model simulations, with grid resolution being too low to effectively model natural processes such as turbulence, which, by the way, completely alter the outcome. Moreover, not enough is known about things such as cloud formation, the sun or the oceans to generate plausible models. The models we do have use hind-casting techniques to calibrate their output to recorded temperature history and are then run forward, in a kind of curve fitting excersise. This is, frankly, about as naive and silly a way of predicting the future as I can imagine.
I don't think you understand "the left" much at all, and the favored solution from most of "the left" that I know -- a CO2 ("carbon") tax -- has the property that it only addresses the claimed problem, while saying nothing at all about the way that we ultimately deal with it. It's explicitly not telling us how to cut CO2 emissions, but merely seeks to assign them a price, so that "the market" will then set about reducing CO2 emissions in whatever way we find most economical and suitable.
I'm also a little unclear on how the left ended up with Mussolini. I thought he was a fascist.
I'm pretty happy with this result: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v382/n6587/abs/382146a0.html
CO2 concentrations measured at the middle of the ocean, and changes in the yearly duration of photosynthesis, works for me.
Tell me, if you wanted to measure the temperature outside your house, would you consult a satellite measuring microwave transmissions or a thermometer adjacent to your house?
I thought the argument was that there is greenhouse effect. I'm not a climatologist but as far as I've studied, greenhouse effect happens in the upper atmosphere first (unless you're at the poles). If surface temperature is rising faster than atmospheric temperature, what you have isn't greenhouse effect.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Of course the global warming hysterics true tyrannical intentions have been unmasked. Stories like this have zero credibility and do not belong in the politics not science section. How about a story about a space elevator?
Oh heck no, I want to see more of this stuff. It's got to be better than science coming from an unbiased source. You can tell it's the truth because it has an actual email in it. When we're done here, I'd like to see the absolute, inarguable proof that Pope John Paul II was a bigot by reproducing the email from him to Yassir Arafat telling the joke about black (Nelson Mandela), the redneck (George W. Bush) and the jew (Menachem Begin) going into the bar and arguing about who's going to pay for the drinks (Mandela won't drink anything until they've all paid the same amount; Begin won't pay anything unless he gets to drink the most and Bush gives him the money; Bush drinks all the drinks, shoots the bartender, and tells the other two they had all agreed the bartender WMDs behind the bar even though they turned out to be those little umbrellas he likes so much in his drinks). If you like, I can help with the headers to make it even more true than the email in the blog post by making them all accurate including IP numbers, even if the headers say it was sent after both were dead.
I'm just kidding, the pope didn't tell that joke. I just made that joke up. He told the one about "Peter, I can see your house from up here."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Much as projections of the height of horse manure in New York said that you'd all be up to your waists in it by the year 2,000? There's so much more to a projection than simply extrapolating a curve.
So Africa doesn't get to industrialize, because the Western world polluted too much before they got their chance? Right.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
And why do you suppose it's only climate scientists who do this? How can you rely on any kind of science at all? After all, they may be just making it up in order to gain research grants. </ sarcasm>
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
We get the most extreme 'end-of-world' slashdot posts from the UK.
Much as projections of the height of horse manure in New York said that you'd all be up to your waists in it by the year 2,000? There's so much more to a projection than simply extrapolating a curve.
I'm not saying the prediction is any good or not, just that that particular complaint probably isn't valit.
a problem with this statement is that according to "An Inconvenient Truth", the CO2 emissions per capita, and even on a total basis in India are much lower that those of the US
IIRC, there was a difference of 10 times in the per capita emissions b/w US and India
Except of course you are looking at per capita emissions, which is a worthless way of looking at things. The reason is that CO2 emissions is not just humans, but it is GDP, plants, etc.
IIRC, there was a difference of 10 times in the per capita emissions b/w US and India
Ideally, shouldnt all the countries have similar per capita emissions??
It would be nice, but that is not the 'fair' thing. I think that all countries should have similar per sq km emissions. Look at it this way. China is hurting for water, and it is about to hurt more. OTH, Russia is sitting on the LARGEST AMOUNTS of fresh water in the world. In fact, they have more than all of North America. And yet, Russia has a fairly small population. Should they be required to give up that water to China and India? Likewise, should the middle east be required to give up their oil? It is a small amount of ppl that own it. These would be fair in the same way. Likewise, China emits well over 1/2 of the mercury in the world (no pollution control and some of the worst coal in the world). The same is true of Sulfur oxides, etc. Far far more than their "fair share". SHould they be required to drop it all right now?
It gets better. There is ZERO chance of being able to get everybody to agree to any of this. So the answer is absolutely no.
Instead, max emissions should be tied to simply seeing how much emissions come from a region. And how to control it? Other nations are taxing your goods based on the CO2 from your air. Period. Then it is up to each nation to decide exactly how they want to control it. There can be no cheating on this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would you say that? Most nations of Africa are some of the lowest emitters. Right now, most would have little to no tax applied to their goods.
However, do you want them to industrialize with coal, and oil making things worse or do you want to use Nukes and Alternative Energy?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First, this is not a tariff. A tariff is something is applied to IMPORTED GOOD ONLY.
Secondly, I WANT THEM TO APPLY IT TO US (would not matter; China's imports from Western nations is pretty much resources only); Heck, I want to see ALL NATIONS APPLY IT ALL GOODS. I would esp. like to see it applied to China AND America. We are the worst on this. America has 48% of electricity from coal and 18 % from Natural Gas (both are dropping). China has nearly 80% from Coal (and climbing fast) and 10% from Natural Gas (again climbing fast ). Likewise, Countries in EU are fighting emissions such as Germany and Poland. Apply this and EVERYBODY (politicians, Business, and citizens) have a strong incentive to drop their CO2.
But good luck getting the forced per capita emissions garbage. If you take that route, it will NEVER solve a thing, and the CO2 will continue. In fact, it will make things worse in the same way that Kyoto does. Right now, if everybody emitted at the same rate as what China PER CAPITA does, the world would have nearly 20% more CO2.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, I mean we need to use averages over some time period. You pretend we don't, so that you can easily 'falsify' predictions using a metric you pulled out of your own arse.
Also, India is a MAJOR emitter (in total quantities and in terms of per sq km). It is only when looking at per capita that they are low.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So Africa doesn't get to industrialize, because the Western world polluted too much before they got their chance? Right.
That is a stupid argument by any measurement. Africa doesn't get to industrialize while polluting like mad bastards would be much better. Ditto for China. Guess what? Emissions controls won't stop industrialization, the worst they can do is slow it down a little. Permitting developing nations to repeat our mistakes unnecessarily is not going to help anyone. You have presented a false dichotomy, which is of course a logical fallacy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Like anyone is going to believe that, now.
I submitted article with the real truth, wonder if slashdot will post it?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
"your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know. "
And from this we can conclude that the Climate Deniers, like Nixon, have only one tool left in their quiver. If one can't come up with any rational scientific explanations to counter the findings of climate scientists that mean global temperatures are in fact rising as the result of burning of fossil fuels, turn to burglary to dig up "dirt" on your opponents, as if somehow the consequence of the entire debate rested upon how it is portrayed in the media. The entire debate if stalled and manipulated may well further enrich a few oil industry titans, but it won't do much to lower the temperature of what is going to be a much hotter world.
Personally, I would prefer that we stop burning fossil fuels and start burning oil company executives, but I suspect it will take a few more degrees of global warming before that solution becomes a widely accepted approach to dealing with a very serious crisis facing humanity.
Isn't the bright side of this lots more arable land in places like Canada and Russia? Seems like we'll need it if the population keeps going up.
Rapid melt of polar caps, especially in the Arctic where the seas are relatively shallow and there are very large stores of methane (a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2), are largely responsible for the cooling. As Arctic ice and the Greenland icesheets permanently disappear, prepare for dramatic increases in temperatures.
We not only have a problem, WE HAVE AN EMEGENCY. The rate at which the change is occurring is MUCH GREATER (nearly two orders of magnitude) than at any time in earth history.
Don't for one minute lull yourself into the complacency of what the biological consequences will be. They will be dramatic, most notably the collapse of most tropical marine ecosystems (due to rapid ocean acidification and sea level rise. Corals can not tolerate high temperatures and low pH and collapses of most high latitude fisheries, as cold adapted species have nowhere to go and their early life history stages are extremely susceptible to such rapid warming. Terrestrial ecosystems will be stressed by dramatically reduced availability of water from glacial and snow melts that tend to dampen periods of intense warm season dryness.
You do realize that the location of these things is near building and stuff, so pretty much not representative of even local temperatures?
Pencil tapping on desk. Looking out a window.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
You are saying that no nation is allowed to raise its CO2-emissions. I am saying that will mean no industrialization in Africa.
I'd prefer them to go for alternative energy, but it's certainly ridiculous for us to tell them that they have to make EVERYTHING without fossil fuels, whereas the Western world is allowed to continue polluting. As for nuclear: Look how happy the rest of the world is when Iran tries for nuclear energy.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
If an African nation is permitted emission levels of ~zero (because they aren't emitting anything right now) while a Western nation is permitted to emit say 20% less than what they emitted in 1990, which one will win in the global economy? If the rich Western countries can't afford to use green technology, how can a poor African nation afford them?
Africa doesn't get to industrialize while polluting like mad bastards would be much better. Ditto for China.
China isn't polluting, compared to Europe or USA. Its per capita emissions are 1/4 of those of the US. When the US has cut its emissions in half it can start talks with the rest of the world.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Iran is not trying for Nuclear Energy. They are working on Nuclear bombs. BIG difference.
As to capping low end countries, ok, that makes sense to allow them to go up (i.e. those that are at ~0 Co2 / sq km should probably be allowed up). When I was thinking of the cap, I was thinking of Developed nations and those like China, Brazil, etc (which IS developed in terms of jobs, simply not of infrastructure).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If an African nation is permitted emission levels of ~zero (because they aren't emitting anything right now) while a Western nation is permitted to emit say 20% less than what they emitted in 1990, which one will win in the global economy?
Life is not a zero-sum game. If an African nation is permitted emission levels like the USA and China, then we'll all suffer that much more, that much quicker. It will NOT help Africa, or Africans.
China isn't polluting, compared to Europe or USA. Its per capita emissions are 1/4 of those of the US.
You're not really this stupid are you? You could say "Chinese people aren't polluting" reasonably, but there's more pollution coming out of China now than out of the USA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't even want to hide how incredibly dumbfuckingblindedly biased you are?
Heres a tip. Stop paying attention to sites that moderate content by deleting dissenting opinions, run by people who delete data in order to hide problems with their work, and even plots to ruin the credibility of peer reviewed journals that publish articles with dissenting views.
When was the last time any of these guys actually performed the scientific method? Instead of doing science, they fuck around in another discipline (statistics) which they arent properly schooled in.. and who do they hide their methods from? People with math degrees.
"His name was James Damore."
That is one hypothesis.
My point is that the science behind global warming theory is immature: mostly at the level of untested hypothesis. As a scientist, I don't want to ignore the danger or claim it isn't there, but I want to explore other hypotheses as well, especially when the temperatures for the past decade don't fit any of the global warming models.
Specific to your point, the melting of the polar ice indeed is occurring, and it is absorbing some heat in the process. But not enough to account for the drop in temperatures we have been seeing. Also, it just doesn't make sense that ice is melting because of increased greenhouse gasses and the result is cooling. Back to my original point, that the ecosystem is far too complex for a single factor to have a huge impact.
He didn't say that at all. You put words in his mouth.
You fail at debating.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Those who bear false witness and say the mean world temperature is not rising have one more fact that they seem unable to explain to account for:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/22/east-antarctic-ice-sheet-nasa
If is not getting warmer, why is ice melting everywhere at accelerated rates and bringing local temperatures in various places temporarily down with it?
Wow. What a warped perception of life. Not everything is based on per-capita. In fact, far far from it. If it is, please go to China and tell the leaders there to give up their mercedes and other items. Likewise, you need to quit emitting so much. Germany is still a VERY large polluter in the world. In fact, it is more than double China. So, why do you not quit living like you do, and give it to CHina?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The thug is the guy who is abusing their position to block open debate. In other words the guys at realclimate who can't take any form of debate what so ever. To the point where they bully and pressure those with dissenting pov's out of the circle. If you're so ignorant to think it doesn't happen, you need to expand your circle of friends.
Om, nomnomnom...
actually, the stall would be BEFORE big ice melts as heat capacity of ice is much higher, to say nothing of the huge amount of energy it takes to make the phase change to liquid water. so the stall should have been much earlier, not now!
They're not going to increase without limit forever, but there certainly is enough remaining fossil fuel for CO2 to increase beyond today's levels, and thus for warming rates to accelerate.
not really actually. ok in the case of natural gas, there's a lot of it, but that's methane and burning it is actually almost better because methane is terrible..
coal, despite its supporters, is actually running out. Used to be all coal was really hard anthracite.. now we're onto cheaper coals. Germany is practically out of anything but lignite, which is pretty shitty coal.
dick cheney himself said repeatedly in late 1990s that the world was screwed for oil.
This is my sig.
I have to dismiss out of hand because of the timing. This is political and not scientific. Any press release right before a summit on climate that makes such disastrous claims has to be assumed to be demonstrably false.
actually, the stall would be BEFORE big ice melts as heat capacity of ice is much higher, to say nothing of the huge amount of energy it takes to make the phase change to liquid water. so the stall should have been much earlier, not now!
The heat capacity of water is about 2x that of ice, and melting ice takes ~80x the energy of heating water 1C. So any stall should happen while the ice is melting, which is apparently now.
If global warming is now slowing down then those who like to bear false witness about global warming have even more serious explaining to do:
Rates of ice sheet melting in Greenland and the Antarctic are accelerating (as is the disappearance of terrestrial glaciers). Since these are based on measures of gravity rather than temperature, the global warming nay-sayers have to account for why the ice is melting more rapidly if the temperature is not going up?
Well whats the answer for this anomaly? Cooler temperatures cause ice to melt more rapidly? If so, how?
Is the Register a relevant source for anything? Not in my experience.
The angle of incidence at the poles is pretty low, and so is the effect on insolation is too. The potentially not-so-pemafrost might be more of a problem.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Interesting. Good to know we have so many climate experts here in Slashdot. Not that it means anything. WAKE UP people!
Heard any good sigs lately?
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
Northern NY has had MANY people come out against wind farms.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
1) You'll have to use average temperatures over some time period. NASA seems to prefer the fiveyear mean. As you can expect, it's not linear, and it never will be.
2) The prediction says "up to 6C"
3) This depends on the trends of fossil fuel consumption staying the same. They won't, but you're free to extrapolate from there.
Don't link to realclimate.org; its heavily partisan and apologetic for even bad science and outlandish claims.
Oh please, what complete FUD! The guys who run real climate are actual climate scientists working for credible institutions whose science and maths are about as rigorous as you will find on any blog. Yes they have disagreements with others working in the field and they're not afraid to pull punches. But "bad science"? "Outlandish"?!!
C'mon, what you get on realclimate.org is the mainstream science. Cut out the cheap propaganda dude.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I think they will find something else to scare us with. They will have to in order to further increase the percentage of our earnings they can control and further increase the percentage of the population that is dependent on government for life.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
...am, please shut up. You're making us all dumber.
Thou shalt not begin a subject line or post with the word "Umm".
The confounding ( actually lack of resolution) caused by griding turns out to be small relative to the measurement error of the predictions, so despite your reservations, the models perform extremely well and the past 10-20 years show that the models do make adequate predictions. Unfortunately, the inaccuracies have so far been in failing to predict even greater warming trends than are in fact being observed (ie its getting hotter faster than predicted by many earlier models that did not take into account oceanographic effects.
+5 informative? - When did the average slashdotter lose the ability to read a graph?
Those charts do not show what the GP is claiming. In fact 20th century tempratures do not even appear on the chart!!! For one thing 100/500,000,000 is way too small to discern on the graph but the real reason is that the nature of moving averages is such that the last 100yrs is statistically unknowable on such a long timescale. Further, according to the text of these well known graphs the intervals used for the short and long term moving averages are 3Myr and 15Myr, in other words not only does it not show the 20th century, mathematically it CANNOT say anything about the trend over the last 3 million years!
I don't know if the GP pulled his conclusion out of his own arse or that of a lobbyist but the style of misdirection is typical of the disinformation that flows like sewage across the internet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
the biggest rate of ice loss was years ago though
There certainly is a lot of things we don't know, such as the magnitude of the influence of oceanic circulation in the high Arctic. It would only take a small amount of change in circulation to move heat elsewhere out of the into the system being studied, particular given pronounced oceanic acidification now being observed globally. Consequently, I really don't see ANY observed significant "DROPS" in temperatures being observed that are outside the bounds of measurement error, although I would love to be corrected by pointers to the literature (science) that suggests it.
As for complex ecosystems, they may be complex but that does not mean they are not easily perturbed by subtle changes. You only have to look at the increases in in mean low temperatures in recent years and the effects such a small shift can have on pine-bark beetles, which are dramatically altering large temperate forest ecosystems over the course of less than a decade. Indeed, much in the biological world is well modeled by dynamic systems operating at the boundaries of order and chaos. In any event, the evidence from coral bleaching seems to provide much more direct evidence of increasing temperatures. If a single factor were to have wide ranging effects, wouldn't we naturally consider temperature as a common explanation. After all, the fundamental building blocks of ecosystems are composed of molecules and atoms, whose behavior relative to temperature is largely well-understood?
At this point in the debate, the onus is on climate change (global warming) deniers to account for the loss of polar (and glacial) ice, if it is not due to temperature and CO2 forced increases (that are nearly coincident with climatic models based on CO2 forcing). Measures of ice loss, as well as sea rise that are based on gravitational measurements, not on temperatures. Since there appears to be no increases in atmospheric pressures, it would seem logical to conclude that temperatures are rising. The most convincing culprit so far is CO2 increases, which just happen to be readily accounted for by the historical record (measurement error and climatic variability not withstanding).
As for waiting for "scientific uncertainty" to become certainty or for total consensus among scientists before acting is a recipe for disaster. If quantum theory teaches us anything, it is that there are probably no certainties, just measurable probable outcomes.
So the question remains, if its not CO2, what is the forcing mechanism?
Although it will becomel warmer at higher latitudes, don't jump to the conclusion that gardens will just pop up everywhere. High latitudes will still have very little daylight during about half of the year not to mention incredibly poor soils. This alone will preclude growing many kinds of plants.
As for world "leaders", they have just been informed that a rise of 6 degrees Celsius is in all likelihood to be expected REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY DO and they have yet to have ANY MEANINGFUL response to the problem, perhaps other than to wait for scientists to tell them that its soon to get a lot warmer.
So while it may be fun to be Pangloss reincarnate, you better plan for some seriously warm weather!
Yes the angle of incidence at the poles is low but it's still enough that with the difference in albedo between ice and open water it has a noticeable effect.
You do realize that a comparison of the record from the 70 weather stations that surfacestations.org marked good or best to the complete weather station network record revealed the urban heat island effect has little or no effect on the measurements. Read about the study here (PDF).
When you're measuring trends it doesn't matter so much what the absolute temperature is but how it's changing over time.
The greenhouse effect starts at the surface and gets smaller as altitude increases and air density decreases.
Iran is not trying for Nuclear Energy. They are working on Nuclear bombs. BIG difference.
How do you know? So far there is no proof that they have created weapons-grade uranium. Obviously a uranium refinement plant can create it, but you need a refinement plant for nuclear power too, so that is neither here nor there.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You're not really this stupid are you? You could say "Chinese people aren't polluting" reasonably, but there's more pollution coming out of China now than out of the USA.
And there's more pollution coming out of North America than of China. Why are national borders significant? Splitting China is 10 doesn't change the emissions.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Likewise, you need to quit emitting so much.
Absolutely, and it will happen.
Germany is still a VERY large polluter in the world.
True. I don't live in Germany.
So, why do you not quit living like you do, and give it to CHina?
That is exactly what we will have to do.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
"Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000"
And how much of the increase this decade would have occurred BEFORE 2000?
Honestly, sometimes the global warming crew just makes me weep. Can they at least start thinking again?
?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Now, as to BURNING CO2 emissions, in 2007, NA emitted 6,780 million tonnes, with America at 5769.3. China emitted 6,071 million tonnes. So, yes, in 2007, China DID emit less, though not by much. The problem is that NA has pretty much quit increasing, while CHina (and a number of smaller countries) continue to increase in massive amounts. For example, over the last 5 years, how much did China increase by?
If you look at the last few years, they have increased by more than 500 million tonnes EACH Year, and we know that it is increasing. THere is LITTLE doubt that last year that China DID pass North America's total. In addition, in another 2 years, they will have more emissions than all of NORTH AMERICA, Europe and latin america COMBINED. Finally, if they simply slow down 400 million tonnes increases, by 2016-2017, they will have accounted for about 1/2 of all CO2 emissions by man. And yet, if you want to hold it in per capita, they do not account for 1/2 of the world's population.
Basically, CHINA is the one responsible for taking the world into fast global warming. AND it is ppl like you that push this insane approach by arguing that China has the RIGHT to emit large CO2 as well as heavy pollution. China's Action are not just irresponsible, but are the actions of a nation that is in a cold war.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why are they not working hard at getting the power plant going? If they really wanted power and not nukes, they simply would have built the plant, and then bought processed uranium on the open market. At this time, it is DIRT DIRT cheap. After a few years, THEN they could have done the processing. In fact, the size and number of their refinement plants, as well as having been started BEFORE the power plant and being hidden, says that it is NOT about a civilian program.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't see a problem with spending money on Earth sciences, matter of fact I think it's a benifit to understand the planet I find myself living on. I do however see a problem with people deliberately peddling dangerous disinformation for profit, I don't care if the disinformation relates to medicine, evolution or climate science. The trend toward "wishfull thinking" and "equal weight to unequal sources" over the last decade reminds me of Sagan's nightmare...
"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir" - Sagan, Demon haunted world (Science as a candle in the dark).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Here's is news from today that would not get accepted to Slashdot front page:
Hackers Prove Global Warming Is A Scam ... Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated. ...
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/11/hackers-prove-global-warming-is-scam.html
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Why are national borders significant?
Another staggeringly stupid question. Sanctions are placed against nations, not continents.
Please think before posting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When the US has cut its emissions in half it can start talks with the rest of the world.
You really haven't thought through the implications of using per capita pollution. One way the US could do this is by doubling its population. And only an idiot thinks it's a good idea to "start talks" after a problem (real or imagined) has been solved.
That's such a stupid thing to say. China is polluting absolutely, and just because it's less per capita doesn't mean it's any less damaging.
The crucial point that is missing your rat brain is the quality of life that results from the pollution. We are here to live a good life, and pollution will always be a factor. China's pollution is much less efficient at creating that quality of life we enjoy in the 1st world.
While you're all arguing about the INEVITABLE, i'm buying up farmland in Canada. If this all pans out, my dynasty will be a rich and powerful one, commanding great swaths of fertile Canadian farmland that will be ripe when the climate warms up. Canadian oranges, anyone?
You're still arguing that China is the problem, when the US emits just as much and is just 1/3 the population.
Yes, if we're to combat global warming, China needs to help too. But the excuse that they have to cut emissions first is ridiculous, when we have been emitting CO2 for 150 years.
Either way it doesn't matter. Emissions aren't going to get cut, except for the limits imposed by the difficulties of fossil fuel extraction.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So because we live longer happier wealthier lives, we are permitted to emit more CO2?
We have definitely reached the "battle of wits against an unarmed opponent" stage here.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Yes, if we're to combat global warming, China needs to help too. But the excuse that they have to cut emissions first is ridiculous, when we have been emitting CO2 for 150 years.
Please, show me where I have suggested that China needs to cut theirs first. I have said that they are the monster on the block (they are) and that ALL OF US need to cut emissions. BTW, China will surpass America in total emissions in the next 3 years. And from most ppls POV, population REALLY DOES NOT MATTER. Heck, the vast majority of emissions is not related to population, but to industry and development. That is what needs to change.
Actually, I like to think that emissions WILL be cut all over. The simple fact is the one or more countries will soon take the approach that I espouse. It is the ONLY possible solution to get a nations emissions down and not watch industry move to a place that emits and pollutes more.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No. But rather than see China go above our levels, we need to get BELOW china's CURRENT LEVELs. That is why I keep pushing the tax on all goods. It makes EVERYBODY pay attention.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm surprised I need to explain this to you, but the reason AGW is so politicized is because it basically criminalizes consumption and gives a moral high ground to the unproductive nations. It's a gigantic opportunity for a power grab and a redistribution of wealth all wrapped in to one. NO ONE wants the Earth to "die a heat death" but the reality is that the data is not indisputable (yet) and the motivations of those leading the charge are frequently suspect, as the CRU data hacking episode proves.
You might also consider that I know what I am talking about. If you look at the average posting on realclimate it is polite, clearly worded, based on facts.
If on the contrary you look at the climate skeptics' sites, they mostly consist of slander, fake facts, and the like.
About the plot you assume: you are currently basing your opinion on material coming from anonymous hackers with a climate-skepticism agenda. Way to go, Rockoon.
Check http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/cru-hack-time-to-hit-back-hard/ for a response, I don't even want to bother with slander.
We have a future to save.
On your statistics claim: statistics are a part of science, it's a fact, face it. If you think realclimate does not understand it, make your case.
You are standing in the way of a better future.
Mashiki, just comment on their site politely and they will respond. Or what did you post that got blocked?