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New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
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
CO2 is a molecule, containing one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. One CO2 molecule is indistinguishable from another[*], so in principle no there is no test to determine whether any particular CO2 molecule coems from a fossil fuel or from another source.
The obvious thing to do however is to measure and estimate the amount of man-made CO2, by summing up the CO2 emitted by smoke stacks, agriculture, forest clearing etc. Given this, I don't think anyone denies that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere comes from any natural source. In fact, so far the inceases in CO2 in the atmosphere has been less than humans have been emitting, due to some natural carbon sinks. For example, small amounts of carbon (but huge on a planetary scale) get dissolved in the oceans. These sinks have limits though, when the natural carbon sinks start to saturate it will only make the problem worse.
[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.
You can measure the ratio of different types of carbon in tree rings.
What has been found is that 13C/12C ratios are the lowest they've been for 10000 years, and that there is a sharp decline starting in 1850.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
RJ Francey et al, Tellus 51B, pp.170-193, 1999
Response from the RealClimate website, here (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853):
This will indeed cause certain people to "wonder". Especially people who do not have the faculties to properly understand the idiomatic uses of the English language, and people who are willing to take words and phrases of out of context, as well as people who are willing to formulate their opinions without considering the actual analysis and instead relying on secondhand hysteria generated by others who are also not willing to consider the actual analysis.
So it goes.
-Laxitive
I think they are basing the CO2 increases on fossil fuel use increases. I don't find the methodology in the article, but by looking at the number of new power plants going on line, and the number of existing ones, it should be pretty easy to get a fairly accurate number.
Regardless, it's a pretty depressing article. And it doesn't mention the methane hydrates that are starting to thaw and bubble up in the northern latitudes. That has the potential to push warming even higher and what is being forecast is already going to be disastrous to every living thing on the planet.
People around now are going to have things bad enough after the next few decades. After that, well, I hope you like Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies...
'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.
It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes. We do not know how much methane hydrate there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release. There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.
Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.
Yes, in the past, the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lagged behind temperature increases. But that does not mean that an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide cannot cause an increase in temperatures now. After all, digging up billions of tons of fossil fuels and burning them is not something that has happened in the past. And we know it's not an increase in solar output causing the warming we've observed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What makes him think that since the measurement method is unreliable for the last 20 years, it is reliable for the rest of the time period hundreds of years back? It throws his entire theory out of the window. He is doing specious reasoning by cherry picking the results that fit his theory better.
That's not what we "learned." The information coming from the hacked emails is ambiguous at worst and probably tells us nothing more than that scientists are humans. There's no serious evidence of falsifying data. If you believe there is, out with it, please.
// This is not a sig.
>>>when Al Gore and Goldman Sachs agree on something you know it's very very bad.
Not really. Both Gore and Sachs will get rich off the carbon-credit trading market. It's no surprise they're on the same side. Now if you said Al Gore and Ron Paul agree, then you'd scare me.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Could be lots of reasons. For instance, we've witnessed accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Melting ice absorbs a lot of heat. More heat being used to melt large ice sheets means the temperature increase may stall until the ice sheets are fully melted. Also, 10 years worth of stalled heating isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It could just be natural climate fluctuations superimposed on a large slow rise in temperature. The five-year average shows little to buck the warming trend.
Even the Climate Change Congress now acknowledges this (quote: "temperature has plateaud"). Why?
Because its main motivation is to understand exactly what's going on with the climate. It doesn't have a political agenda. The best data right now suggests that the climate is getting warmer and that a probable reason for that is anthropogenic CO2. If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
You say that as if they've responded thus far. As far as I can tell, the developing world is completely exempt from any decision on climate change, and various other efforts to get world leaders to acknowledge and act on climate change have garnered meager changes in policy at best. Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior.
Prove it. Since CO2 levels have been higher in the past, it stands to reason that sealife is already adapted to higher levels of dissolved CO2 in seawater. Experts on the subject see no damage being specifically caused by CO2 in seawater. This is not to say that there is no pressing need for action on what happens in the ocean - pollution and fishing practices (like dredging and drag nets) are causing uncountable damage.
planet texture maps and more
Some emails were leaked on Friday from the climate research unit at the university of East Anglia. In about 150 megabytes of text, it turned out that in one of the emails, one of the researchers used the word 'trick' to describe some unspecified method of statistical analysis he had used on some dataset, and mentioned that it would 'hide the decline'. Everyone immediately saw that obviously this trick was dishonest and the decline in question was a real decline in temperatures, and it means that the entire field of climate science has been perpetrating a decades-long hoax on the world, and Al Gore should be tried for treason. Because you don't need any kind of context to know exactly what the word 'trick' refers to and what 'decline' is being hidden and why; your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know.
That's why articles about climate change can expect to be tagged with such things for quite some time into the future.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
That is BS. If you bothered to read the refutations, the divergences are themselves a subject of many publications, and this has been out in the open forever.
I do agree that access to the raw data could be better, and even that some of the statistical methods etc have been applied poorly (or even incorrectly). You might even find, somewhere in the stack of tens of thousands of climate science publications, some that misrepresent the data, perhaps even deliberately. Not all scientists are as expert as they should be in statistics, and scientists are human and have human frailties (although that doesn't excuse anything). But this does not appear to be one of those cases. You are reading far too much into one email, and you clearly are not aware of the context.
If all of the science of global climate change depended on a single set of proxy data, then you would have a point. But it doesn't, and you don't.
How about http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8233632.stm
Or maybe http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=a5LmlZgQzoPQ&refer=australia
And http://www.azocleantech.com/details.asp?newsID=3740
Then there is http://ecobridge.org/content/g_evd.htm#Disintegration
Also http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/29/coral-reefs-glue.html
Of course there is also the http://www.coral.org/resources/about_coral_reefs/threats_to_coral_reefs
I could go on, but I have a feeling that it still wouldn't convince you. Global Warming is not a myth. True, the Earth does go through cycles. I don't dispute that. However, the rate of climate change is far faster than previous cyclic rates. The rate now versus that of the pre-industrial age is much, much faster. The global ecology cannot adapt fast enough to the change. What used to take thousands of years now takes hundreds, and increasingly, decades. There is plenty of research all around to find. Pretty much the only studies that disagree with the idea of global warming are those that are done by the oil companies and their allies.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
How does it stand to reason?
Methane and cyanogen levels were enormously higher during the immediate post Hadean era, and remained somewhat high all the way to the precambrian. Does that say anything about modern life-forms tolerances for Cyanide? Oxygen levels were lower in the Cambrian, does that mean that modern life could get by just fine on 11% atmospheric O2? They reached 24% or so during the Jurassic. Does that mean modern forests wouldn't have massive wildfire problems if they rose that high again in your lifetime?
If you're going to throw around nebulous terms such as "the past" and "higher", don't you think you should know how long in the past, or how much higher, before you try to reason about it.
Who is John Cabal?
The one I find convincing is the melting of the ice. It's a crude kind of measure, lacking in detail, but any explanation that doesn't account for that is obviously unacceptable.
The North-West passage is currently open to ice-breakers, and it is projected to be open to normal passenger liners soon. This doesn't give me many data points, but the ones it give are irrefutable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What are you basing your statements on? Can you cite some research which isn't based on CRU's Hockey Stick graph which has been debunked and which clearly indicates that global warming is happening and it is not due to any natural geological cycle?
I am asking for research which indicates clearly that global warming is occurring due to humans and this research must not be based on CRU's data.
No, I am not quoting some idiot paid by oil companies to distort science, I think it is perfectly reasonable to cite researchers who have:
a) Placed their data online
b) Placed the source of the programs they have written to arrive at the results
c) Placed their detailed findings online
http://forkbomb.org/~ml/cmail/mail/1254751382.txt
If you would rather believe a bunch of "scientists" who claim to have lost their raw data but who seem to have retained all the results data, then please go ahead.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/
Just a few questions for you:
1. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was stored on a single storage medium and that ALL scientists who ever worked on the data, worked on this single storage - that too on the only master storage of data without ever taking any copies of this data?
2. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was lost despite the fact that the email log released yesterday includes emails even from the mid 1990s. Why is that email was backed up while the rest of the data was lost?
3. Why is that even reputed magazines such as Nature and Science who have policies on data retention for all articles published in them didn't either a) Get the data from CRU or b) Retain this data - despite it being their own policy?
4. Why isn't CRU releasing the raw data even now - despite all the controversy and wide-spread feeling that the research is flawed?
Also, I would be interested in hearing a response from CRU on the email sent to CRU by Fred Pearce from New Scientist as early as 1996.
http://forkbomb.org/~ml/cmail/mail/0845217169.txt
When heat enters a system temperature will not change until the phase change is complete. Once our icecaps have melted, temperature will start rising more dramatically.
One convenient locations...in Africa.