Doubling of CO2 Not So Tragic After All?

carvalhao writes "The Register reports on a study from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that claims that new climate models that account for the effects of increased CO2 levels on plant growth result on a 1.64 C increase for a doubling of CO2 concentrations, a far less gloomy scenario than previously considered."

Comments

Re:Asking the right question

[Namarrgon]

1) Is the climate warming or cooling?
2) Are humans responsible?

Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group I.

3) What's going to happen that's so bad we have to "do something about" now?
4) When is that going to happen?

Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group II.

WGI establishes the physical basis of anthropogenic climate change. AFAIK this is has not been convincingly challenged. WGII attempts to quantify the results, which is of course harder to pin down (and included a notorious inaccuracy or two). This new study will doubtless help refine the WGII predictions further.

Re:The models are crap.

[TapeCutter]

The first real demonstration of climate model skill was in the 1960's when models predicted the counter intuitive phenomena of stratosphereic cooling. The next significant demonstration was when models in the 80's predicted the phenomena of polar-amplification. Both these phenomena were predicted by models before they were confirmed with observations. As for predicting the global average temprature trend the observations have been well within the error bars of model predictions since the 1970's.

"You wouldnt get in an airplane designed by model results as crappy as these"

Hate to break this to you but you already do, climate models work on the same finite element algorithims as any other engineering model does when there is no anylitical solution to the equations. Computers have been doing this type of numerical analysis since they were first invented and took over the job of producing artilery tables. Such methods have revolutionised both science and engineering over the pats 50yrs to the point that no major engineering project would dare contemplate not using them.

Are they perfect? - Of course not but imperfect certainly does not mean useless, if it did all of science would be useless.

Everyone here is a vegetarian, right?

[regular_gonzalez]

Just want to verify that everyone who is full-on convinced about the negative effects of climate change is a vegetarian. At this point it's essentially indisputable that eating meat -- particularly beef, but all meat due to second order effects aside from methane (increased fuel usage for the additional grain required to grow animals, etc) -- is a significant factor in greenhouse gas production. If every American became vegetarian, the reduction of greenhouse gasses would be greater than swapping out every SUV for an electric car. So, those of you pilloring consumers, government, or industry -- you've already made the switch, right? Cause you wouldn't want to be hypocritical.