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

[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

[NFN_NLN]

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.

4x factorial, that's insane. On the bright side, Canada will finally gain an ice free northwest passage.

Looks like Sir John Franklin jumped the gun by 200 years. Lead is a helluva drug.

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

[camperslo]

Even though the waves from the tsunami following the recent 9.0 Japan earthquake were not very large when hitting Antarctica, about 50 square miles of ice broke off.
Some of the many factors are not linear, so a simple loss multiplier or even one based on monotonically increasing loss will have limited accuracy. That's no excuse for denial, as what's happening is quite clear.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=51665&src=eorss-nh

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

[khallow]

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when it's clearly doing harm, it's a matter of degree.

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

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.

So what if some people have to "do more"? Let's keep in mind that the proposed fix, reverting to 1990s levels or less, also forces some people to "do more" than other people. We also need to keep in mind that there's no mechanism in place that can keep those who would suffer under a climate control regime from complying. Currently, the future CO2 producers will be the US and the bigger emerging countries such as China and India. None of them have shown the inclination to damage their economies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. And they all have sufficient power to avoid being forced to accept a climate deal that is detrimental to their interests.

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

Most buildings have a life of around 20-50 years. So any problem that's on a longer time scale mostly will involve real estate that hasn't yet been built.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

So it's just an amazing coincidence that we'll have ice-free summers in the Arctic 200 years after we started burning fossil fuels en masse?

We have excellent "undeniable" evidence of global warming. We have over 100 years of climatology that tell us that the carbon sensitivity is probably between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, starting with Arrhenius and continuing to the latest estimations. We have agreed that we want to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius. The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately, given the information we presently have. To me, that says "Act now!"

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

[bunratty]

We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise. We have a mechanism of causation: carbon dioxide is conclusively known to be a greenhouse gas. So, yes, burning fossil fuels absolutely does increase global temperature. Of that, there's no doubt at all. The only question is how much. A few climatologists argue that it's not enough to worry about, but the vast majority conclude that the climate sensitivity is above 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is enough that it makes economic sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

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

[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

[blueg3]

The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven.

It's actually very well-understood. Arrhenius figured it out ages ago. The details in situ turn out to be moderately more complicated, but no intractable.

Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,

I suspect talking science at you is like talking to a wall, but it's not heat capacity. Heat capacity is a different thing. Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas, It's also accounted for in most of the models, funny that. The reason it's not as significant a factor is that it's difficult to actually change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (overall).

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

[Jmc23]

Energy isn't everything. Unless you're completely idiotic you must realize that everything that consumes energy requires resources to construct of which we have a finite amount. Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time, nor in the foreseeable future. We can't even reliably tap into the over abundant energy from the sun that falls on the earth.

The western way of living requires taking resources from other countries. Grow up, you are not the only country on earth, you are not the only society entitled to the bounty that the world has to offer.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You've misunderstood the IPCCs view on the sun.
They understand the Sun to be a major contributor to the climate, but they do understand that the recent warming is NOT due to the Sun for a number of reasons.
(1) The Suns output has not increased, yet temperatures increased.
(2) The Stratosphere is COOLING. This is important. If the Sun were warming things then the Stratosphere would NOT be cooling. This cooling is predicted to occur due to the physics of CO2 and is being observed.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

It seems you're getting your info on environmentalists from Fox News stereotypes rather than the real world. Most intelligent environmentalists (the type you're likely to run into on Slashdot) DO advocate for nuclear power, and none want to turn the world communist or have us live in caves.

Better link

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw ibtimes, worthless ad-walling craps.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110811113956.htm

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:Typical science news...

[cbeaudry]

There is so much to say about the latest swine flu fiasco I wont get into it in details, because its a much too long converstation.

However, 18000 deaths for a seasonal flu is just par for the course and also much below average.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_pandemic

There are many reasons why the flu, though something to keep a close eye on, is not to be as feared as it once was. Nutrition, general population health and hygiene to name a few.

Now, I'm not against vaccines, keeping a close eye on the flu strains and even putting out warnings when necessary, however the 2009 swine flu scare was not a media scare, it was a Pharmaceutical scare. They had ramped up the scaremongering, production and used their influence in the WHO to make huge profits.

With the scaremongering and WHO feeding the frenzy, countries had no choice but to buy in and buy in WAY TOO MUCH. Even if the scare is fake, if all other countries are buying vaccines, not buying them could kill a political career. :) I've gone and started on the subject... like I said, there is much still to be said about this subject.

Politics?

[DreadfulGrape]

Interesting that /. has categorized this article as "Politics" instead of "Science."

Not that I'm complaining, necessarily.

Terrible Headline

[jmac_the_man]

The way the headline reads, it looks like MIT is accusing the UN of not taking Arctic ice into account in their global warming calculation, i.e. MIT says there should be less global warming because the UN forgot to calculate a cold thing.

That is the OPPOSITE MESSAGE from what the story actually says. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?

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.

Re:Should be interesting

[SnapShot]

It would be different if I could ride a polar bear to work, though.

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.

And I'll NEVER forget!

[Anonymous Coward]

But in fact 18000 did die,

Every July, I dress up in my Red, White, and Blue and tell people about the ATTACK on this country by H5N1! The flue hates our Freedom!

They ask, "How can Flu hate our Freedom!"

And I respond, "it's because we're Free!"

If that's true, they say and it was about Freedom, then why didn't the Flu attack Sweden?! I say, "IT DID! That's how treacherous it is!

I've protested! And no one pays attention, but we wake up and find our nation ruled by the law of the Flu, they'll wake up! They sure will!

Non-anthropogenic causes

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

> 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.

What's an example of one that's not already been weeded out?

Solar output has been measured by satellite since 1978, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ACRIMIII/Images/solar_irradiance_right.gif. Orbit cycles have been understood for a long time.

Right. The science is settled.

[tp1024]

There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.

You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.