UN Climate Report Fails To Capture Arctic Ice: MIT

An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends,' says a new research from MIT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100. However, the Arctic sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted, according to Pierre Rampal and his research team of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)."

Comments

Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

And trolls will trot out some generic stereotype strawman, then post as Anonymous Coward. /irony noted

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[mean pun]

Yeah, that's a really accurate translation of the scientific statement. Don't give up your day job.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think it makes sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

To make an analogy, a business may go bankrupt in one year or four years. Do they not have any clue what to do, or is it clear that they need to cut costs or increase revenues to stay in business? In life, we can't wait until we have perfect information before we act, otherwise we'd never act.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Mashiki]

That *is* the accurate translation of the scientific statement into politics, and the political agenda that governments are basing things on. In other words, people with an agenda who want to drive you into the dirt.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[TemperedAlchemist]

You may want to educate yourself before posting claims.

1) It's still called global warming. Always has. The media calls it "climate change", even though properly it's global warming.
2) Ozone is O3, which exists as a gas in our atmosphere. A spacecraft can no more "puncture" ozone than you can puncture the air around you with your fists.
3) We first started recording global temperature change in the mid-20th century.
4) No reputable scientific paper or journal has predicted a "doomsday", the media make those claims.
5) CO2 is not the only "greenhouse" gas, or even the most important.
6) There is cause for concern, but no cause for "judgment day" or "doomsday".

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

Trends and quantitative coefficients are not the same thing. In this case the trend matters for policy makers, the coefficients do too, but not nearly so much.

Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate? Even if we have the quantized result, say on warming or drunk driving or anything else that doesn't really tell us what policy should be unless you want to say it should be 0. What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff. For drunk driving you accept a certain degree of impairment as so minimal as to not really be important, though if we drove cars that went 1000Km/h we'd have a different tolerance level. For global warming we have to accept some amount of warming, because there has already been some, and we're not, in any reasonable time frame going to correct that. So the question is 'how much worse do we let it get, and, on a best guess, how much is it going to cost us'? To with that we wonder 'at what point can we not do any more'? With the ozone layer 160 of the 200 or so countries in the world banned the most serious damaging chemicals about 15 years ago. So there is still damage to the ozone layer happening, and it is likely that it won't be completely repaired until well into the 22nd century. We've certainly taken, in that case, the largest most relevant steps, and we'll be another decade or two before we really know if it was enough, or if we need to do more, but at least we've stopped the, majority of the ongoing damage.

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more. None of these make for good policy problems, especially when dealing with the americans. The kyoto protocols aim for a CO2 reduction from 1990 levels are basically arbitrary, it's a starting point of a policy, not a quantified analysis of what's required. Because there is no scientific requirement, it's a matter of what cost/benefit we are willing to trade. But it's also a collective, shared responsibility, one that isn't going to be borne equally. Poor countries are poor for a lot of reasons, but the rest of us got rich polluting the planet, and now we're saying they can't become rich unless the do it a different way, that's not fair to them, but it's not fair to the rich world to demand we make all the cuts and poor countries can pollute like crazy negating anything we do.

Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem. We're not doing enough. It's a matter of degree of how much we're not doing. The only thing to do is to try and minimize further warming, and iterate as time goes on.

Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc. It's a rare, specialized skill to put actual coefficients in front of each term, and most of the time, big O notation gets the job done (and if you really need them it's easier to measure them than calculate them). Policy based around science is mostly worried about the big O notation, because once we start changing policies, whether thats about the ozone layer, sulfur in the air, greenhouse gases or whatever, all the previous detailed assessments get thrown out, and you start looking for the new trend.

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when i

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Doc Ruby]

"Translated into politics" = LIE

The political agenda that cites science of climate change does not have an agenda of driving you into the dirt. The political agenda is to stop polluters from driving us into the dirt.

The political agenda that attacks climate change science is the one that forces the original science to report only the most optimistic projections, based on only the most undeniable evidence. When new science shows that there's a higher probability of a worse projection, that does indeed undermine the credibility of the earlier, pressured science. The proper conclusion is not to ignore the worse projection, but to expect that the accurate projection is even worse still, since the better science is only getting started rolling back the suppression.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, well let's look at this one. It we could be losing it at x rate, or 4x! Translation: we don't have any frapping clue. Yeah, that's what we want to base worldwide economic policy on.

Or maybe you should RTFS a little closer. Four years ago they concluded we were losing it at x rate, and this more recent MIT research claims we're losing it at 4x rate. If you RTFA the researchers say this is because the IPCC looked primarily at temperature change and underestimated the effect mechanical forces such as drift have on thinning.

Look, you can bury your head in the sand all you want, but don't act surprised when some of us take it more seriously that Arctic ice has shrunk by a third in the past 30 years and that it hit a new low in July.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

We do know that it's melting

And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years.

and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.

To make an analogy, a business may go bankrupt in one year or four years. Do they not have any clue what to do, or is it clear that they need to cut costs or increase revenues to stay in business?

In that situation, it'd probably be best if they entered bankruptcy court now since they're in the end game.

In life, we can't wait until we have perfect information before we act, otherwise we'd never act.

We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.

So let's look at the situation. We have some evidence that there's global warming, some connection with greenhouse gas emissions by humans, and models with quality that varies from pretty good (radiative models) to extremely poor (the economic factors in climate estimates a century from now). We have significant institutional biases (particularly, funding, peer pressure, and the environmentalism ideology). We have huge amount of money and political power in play (environmental government agencies, for example, can expand their power considerably). And we have a remarkable lack of urgency.

That says to me "wait". We'll get better data and if things get worse, it'll be rather slowly. It'll also give us time to weed out alternate explanations for the perceived global warming such as changes in solar activity, orbital configuration, or other non-anthropogenic possibilities.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jawnn]

As is typical for climate change deniers, you have left out a key factor in your "the climate is always changing" screed.
The correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and warmer climates is well established. And there is reason to debate which is the cause and which is the effect. What you have so conveniently omitted from your argument however, is that, as near as we can tell the level of CO2 has never risen as quickly as it has for the last few decades. Not even close. Given that empirical evidence and it's temporal proximity to our CO2 producing activities, only a fool or someone with an agenda would ignore the correlation.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do? There are lots of ways to accomplish that, all of which come with their own trade offs of course. Nuclear is well, nuclear, solar and wind have their own complications (mostly about resources and space uses). Burning coal and oil isn't exactly good for the atmosphere. Less CO2 in the atmosphere is good.

The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps. 15% before 1990 levels is both arbitrary and silly. That equates to some actual year (probably 1987 or something), so even the target is phrased in a goofy way. And we can't even do that. Therein lies the problem. The burden on people are going to follow the protocol and make cuts (mostly europeans) is going to be harder, and more to the point if we need to cut X from the atmosphere and only europe is going to cut anything they have to not only cut X, but X+Y, where Y is whetever everyone else is adding to the problem. And yes, no one is obliged to accept anything. International agreements rely on everyone who agrees to actually do it. That's my point of where policy starts to fall apart. Peace treaties require everyone agrees, war requires only one party to agree to it. Such is the way of international agreements. You can try all you want to impose your will on others, and there are non violent ways to accomplish that, but in the end yes, if china doesn't agree to go along with it, either the rest of us cut more to cope, try and impose our will on them (trade sanctions) or we do nothing and cope with the consequences. Of course if no one goes along with it china is unlikely to try and solve this problem on their own, not that they could if they wanted to.

But yes, we must disagree on what to do about it. If you think displacing millions of people, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep more people from having to move, seriously disrupting food production around the world and so on are worthwhile tradeoffs so you can keep using coal fired generators rather than uranium, thorium, solar, or wind, then all that remains is disagreement.

Most buildings have life spans several multiples if not orders of magnitude longer than you have suggested. That that may not be good policy, or good for the buildings and people inhabiting them, but your assertion is factually incorrect. Lots of post WW2 housing was not built to last, that's true, but that is a fraction of the total buildings built in the world.

Land is not that scare is an interesting assertion. I certainly disagree with it on two levels. First, not all land is useful. There's lots of empty land in the middle of the sahara, that doesn't help anyone. That goes to the first problem which is that *usable* land is becoming scarce, and moreso if we want to preserve any remnants of natural habitats for other creatures. Secondly, land, overall, in a lot of places *is* scarce, and, importantly, those are the most populated places, and many of them are poor and those people aren't going to be able to move to places with space (least of all places with usable space). Where are we going to move a few hundred million southeast asians, or chinese or japanese? How about europeans? They aren't exactly welcome in africa for example, and the reason the europeans went rampaging around the world is they didn't have enough space for themselves in europe. And there were a lot less people in europe 150 years ago than there are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_(based_on_food_growing_capacity) has an illustrative chart. What you are suggesting is sacrificing habitable, food growing areas, to compact people into less space, and hope more of it becomes arable. Not to mention the enormous cost of packing up and moving people and all of the infrastructure t

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

Yes there is correlation, CO2 TRAILS not leads temperature increases!

Congratulations, you know about the feedback side of CO2. No go learn something about the forcing side. It's not an either/or situation.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

If the Alarmists TRULY believe in what they are preaching, they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form. Thorium, molten salt, boiling water, whatever and further, be agitating for more research into smaller, better plants. Because nuclear is the ONLY viable replacement for base load requirements.

Just think of the progress we could have made by now if in the last 15 years there was a full court press on designing a safe and efficient nuclear plant instead of spending millions of dollars trying to gin up enough evidence to convince the majority of people to revert 100 years into the past.

But they don't. Instead, they do advocate strenuously for the transparent radical hippie Green Agenda, that says we should all live in communes and eat bug, twigs, and nuts. Or, if you want to be more ominous, AGW is the perfect vehicle to do what 40 years of cold war could not do , which is to bring Soviet style communism to the States. But only if you want to be ominous.

The bottom line is they only want to solve this "problem" by using THEIR solutions and programs. Or perhaps they invented this "problem" so that they could force their way of living on the majority.

So until I see Hansen, et. al. before Congress advocating for nuclear power, I'll just assume they are a bunch of environmentalist control freaks looking to force others into living they way they deem is correct. Of course the radical environmentalist wackos won't live that way...see Al Gore.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[thrich81]

Hiding out all day in the air conditioning != "just fine". Ask the farmers and ranchers in TX if they are doing just fine. The municipal water supplies for some Hill Country cities (Llano, etc.) are already dried up or soon will be. Another summer like this one with no winter rains again and Lake Travis dries up and then no one in Central TX will be doing fine.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

perhaps you need to accept that the western lifestyle is unsustainable and stop being greedy. Not even nuclear can provide the unsustainable energy needs and lifestyle for everybody on the planet.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[he-sk]

That raging nuclear furnace in the sky is 150 MILLION KM AWAY.

If you build your nuclear power plants that far away from earth I have no problems with them.

Also, there is a cheap and proven solution to harness the energy expended by the sun. It's called a wind farm.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Stephan Schulz]

Nuclear is a cheap, easy, simple method to provide lots of power.

Nuclear energy has never been produced at market price anywhere in the world. Development has been done nearly exclusively in government labs or based on government subsidies. No nuclear plant can get sufficient insurance to cover accidents on the free marktet. Governments guarantee nuclear waste disposal at subsidised prices.

And I'm sure looking forward to a world where Nigeria, Belize, Tuvalu, and Iran produce their power from nuclear plants...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jandersen]

If the Alarmists TRULY believe in what they are preaching, they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form. Thorium, molten salt, boiling water, whatever and further, be agitating for more research into smaller, better plants. Because nuclear is the ONLY viable replacement for base load requirements.

Hmm, I can't speak for "the Alarmists" - they must be a special American party whose agenda is mostly based on hype and willful misinterpretation; are they the ones that call themselves "the Tea Party"? Only joking, of course.

As for nuclear power - there is much to be said for using nuclear power if we can improve on the reactor design; they are still too wasteful and risky; a kind of steam engine with added radiation. As for whether it is the only viable replacement, I am not convinced; it will take real numbers and solid facts, not just arm-waving and loudness.

Just think of the progress we could have made by now if in the last 15 years there was a full court press on designing a safe and efficient nuclear plant instead of spending millions of dollars trying to gin up enough evidence to convince the majority of people to revert 100 years into the past.

What, you mean nobody has done any research in the last 15 years?

Unfortunately, this is basic research, and unfortunately, in basic research it is very often not a matter of how many people are doing it, or how much money is available, because basic research depends so heavily on getting new ideas. My guess is that we would not have come much further than we already are. Personally, I would have liked to see more resources spent on fusion research, which I still think has the most potential.

But they don't. Instead, they do advocate strenuously for the transparent radical hippie Green Agenda, that says we should all live in communes and eat bug, twigs, and nuts. Or, if you want to be more ominous, AGW is the perfect vehicle to do what 40 years of cold war could not do , which is to bring Soviet style communism to the States. But only if you want to be ominous.

Mate, you've just disqualified yourself in my view. It is one thing referring to climate researchers as "alarmists", which in itself is rather insulting (but, alas, something we have grown used to), but when you start using words like "hippie", "green" and "communism" as if they were expletives, you are simply putting your abysmal ignorance and myopic bias on full, public display.

If what you are after is serious, fact-based policies and credible research, you have to do better than that; you can't calm down other people by screaming hysterical abuse on the top of your voice.

So until I see Hansen, et. al. before Congress advocating for nuclear power, I'll just assume they are a bunch of environmentalist control freaks looking to force others into living they way they deem is correct. Of course the radical environmentalist wackos won't live that way...see Al Gore.

You can of course see whoever as whatever, if that is what you want. But if you want to take part in the debate in a serious way, or even just understand what goes on, you have to realise - and accept - that when scientists put forward their opinions, they are only putting forward opinions: their interpretation of the data they have been working with. They, themselves, generally believe in their own conclusions, but they are also aware that they may have made mistakes - it is a fundamental part of scientific discourse that you present your data and conclusions to your colleagues, thereby inviting everybody to try to pick their logic apart. IOW, if you have solid, scientific arguments, please come forward and let everybody hear.

Otherwise, perhaps it would be more helpful if you kept your voice down? Not that I want to curb your right to express your views, but there are just too many noisemakers trying to drown any meaningful discussion about this uncomfortable subject; why contribute to that?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AmiMoJo]

perhaps you need to accept that the western lifestyle is unsustainable

Fortunately the alternative is a better lifestyle, not going back to the dark ages as many climate change denialists like to claim. We have reached the tipping point where green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel or nuclear power, and new technology cuts down on waste e.g. by reading the news on a screen rather than dead trees.

The best source restricted

[Anonymous Coward]

The US military has detailed information on ice sheet thickness going back 50 years but it's mostly classified. The Russians have similar information and I think their excitement recently over exploiting the arctic shows where they think the trend is heading. They aren't looking at a 100 years from now but in the next decade or two. Most of the discussion is over coverage of the ice but the more telling is thickness. As the ice thins a huge part of the arctic could be exposed in a single season from a major collapse in sea ice.

Re:The best source restricted

[kenh]

50 years of data sounds like a lot, until you realize it doesn't even go back in time far enough to include the last ice age... It's like extrapolating the stock market's performance for the day by analyzing the previous few minutes of trading.

Typical science news...

[Darkness404]

Typical science news "ZOMG our predictions could be wrong, but we need $x million to do more research about if we are right or not". Everything is made into a crisis to get more funding. Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Re:Typical science news...

[interkin3tic]

Everything is made into a crisis to get more funding.

Therefore it's absolutely safe to conclude that there can be no possible crises ever.

[/s] SARS, the bird flu, and the swine flu were made into crises by the media, not scientists. If you equate what you hear in the news with science, you've got big problems. As far as MERSA goes, it does seem to be fairly bad. I don't know if some scientist told you that everyone was going to die in 3 years if they didn't get funded or what, but this anti-science thing you've got going on is stupid.

Re:Typical science news...

[chrb]

Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.

The 1918 flu pandemic infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.

Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.

But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.

Rant over...

Re:Should be interesting

[bunratty]

Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we can't have cars. It means that cars need to be more energy efficient in the near future and run on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions doesn't mean doing without. It seems that most people who don't want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions really just don't want to lower their standard of living. Fortunately, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and keep our standard of living.

Re:Terrible Headline

[phantomfive]

It seems more-or-less to represent the article. If you want a direct quote from the article that kind of conveys the same message, there is this one:

On the other hand, large cracks in winter's ice cover help create new ice, since the extremely cold air in contact with the liquid ocean promotes refreezing. Because "everything is coupled" in these intricate feedback loops, "it's hard to predict the future of Arctic sea ice," Rampal says.