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Climate Panel Says To Prepare For Weird Weather
Layzej writes "Extreme weather, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave or the drought in the horn of Africa, will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in a report released today. Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes. Critics of the report note that 'Governments have in the past considerably weakened the language of IPCC summaries for policymakers,' and that the IPCC process tends to water down even the most obvious conclusions."
All Himalayan glaciers will have melted before the Christmas.
LOL like you said 50 years ago, Notice how all this has happen before like i don't know cycles maybe...
sorry but as long as I can play my sega cd, I don't care.
Never mind about what we said about the hot weather, just get your mittens and coats ready when solar magnetic decline and solar minimum freeze (y)our rears off in 2020...
The planet warming WILL result in regions cooling because it disrupts the heat transfer mechanisms. Central Europe cooling would likely be disruption to the trade winds and the Atlantic Conveyer. It is extremely naive to assume that global warming equates to local warming and the fact that your environment is the coldest in 50 years really should have tipped you off.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I remember all the headlines about New York city would be buried under ice as part of the new ice age to be here by the year 2000. That was in the 70's. So they have a track record for being wrong.:-)
I totally agree! A bunch of scientists were wrong once. Sure, they got more data and reevaluated their models to be more accurate, but since they were wrong once there's no good reason to ever listen to them!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
>>There's going to be snow on Christmas, and I'm not too sure I like that!
Me, too, and I live in Australia!
In fact increased heat in the system has several counter intuitive effects. This is because increased heat vaporizes more water increasing the length and severity of storm events. More Cat 5 hurricanes, more snow, more floods. Conversely it means frequent and unpredictable changes in weather patterns. This has to do with greater swings in climate, increased frequency of swings. This is what thermodynamicists refer to as a system in purturbation.
Even the researchers that had objected to global warming now acknowledges its happening. The evidence in incontrovertible. They still argue to the cause, but considering that the year 2011 saw unprecedented production of greenhouse gases (far exceeding even the worst case scenarios), it should now be clear to anyone who doesn't have a personal axe to grind that the climate is in the process of extraordinary change, and that the conditions we rely on to feed 7 billion people are about to get very dicey. It is now time to begin global projects designed to move humanity off of fossil fuel. High altitude wind power, space based solar power, small thorium base reactors, high performance hydrogen fuel cells and advanced power storage technologies could easily cover our need until we perfect fusion. The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
Don't forget the acid rain!
Will it also make some places more habitable?
Well, maybe if we wouldn't live on this planet with 7 billion people in the first place then all this climate mumbo jumbo wouldn't matter as much. But hey, it's so much better to limit us all than keep the population in check!
Who has a track record for being wrong? Can you point to even a single article published in a respectable scientific journal that claimed that?
Would becoming 'increasingly marginal as a place to live' include the Gulf of Mexico being taken over by a large, year-round, standing hurricane?
If you keep having "bloody cold" winters for the next 10 years then you might have something. Otherwise you're just experiencing natural variation.
You would do well to consider that flooded server rooms may have an adverse impact on the IT infrastructure.
Same can be said for production facilities. Take the recent example of Thailand floods causing an hard drive shortage that is steadily driving prices up.
Adverse weather will only make things gradually more challenging, requiring more technical know-how and workarounds to deal with it.
Wanna bet!
I remember all the headlines about New York city would be buried under ice as part of the new ice age to be here by the year 2000.
[citation needed]
Scientists aren't taking into account that our Solar System actually orbits around another Solar System some call The Milky Way Galaxy and none have taken into consideration that passing nearby celeastial bodies as well as passing through regions of devious electromagnetic and other phenomenon would surely influence our Solar sun in ways that would pass said influence onto the planets in orbin including Earth.
There is just too much "new" to ever call any matter as predictable. I think the Geothermal activity is causing more global warming than anything in the atmosphere. Comparing another Planet like Mars to Earth is an example how Mar even with a dead core is much more habitable than Planet Earth because Earth has so-much sea water insulating the the hot core from scorching the surfact. Foremost, it's already a known fact that Planet Earth is experiencing Global Warming just like all the other planets whom are having much more detectable levels of erupting volcanoes so that is proof alone that there is some thing influencing the Solar System much more than Carbon output.
Would help if there weren't so many left wing nut jobs (read: Republicans) telling the world that abortion is murder, and religious fools (read: The Vatican) that contraception is a sin.
At an average mean and equal temperature, yes? I mean, every location on the planet should have the same temperature range, right? We would not want anyone to have to migrate to another area to live, because of course our ancestors never had to do that, right?
This is the same IPCC that said we wouldn't have any glaciers by 2010, or icesheets, or that the northwest passage would be open to traffic(never mind it's been open to traffic since it was first charted). Or that there would never be snow again on various mountains, and so on and so forth. Or that we'd all be dead what was it this year? Or is it next year? I can never keep it straight with all these doomsday predictions from all these environmental groups, and government backed organizations.
Reading fail. The IPCC never said we wouldn't have glaciers or ice sheets by 2010. I'd be willing to put my whole retirement savings up to bet you can't back that statement up (and I'm 59 years old so I have some). I wouldn't call requiring a heavy duty ice breaker to get through the northwest passage in less than a couple of years "open to traffic".
Guys like you never examine the projected time frames on IPCC (and other climate scientists) statements very carefully. You think everything's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years and if it's longer than that you don't think it's worth worrying about.
I think we've past the tipping point already. At the least, I don't think we can change our habits enough to prevent climate change at this point, so...
I think we need to start planning for the aftermath of all of this, and do as much as we can in preparation for those changes. Unfortunately I don't think we will, and all I can see is a lot of people needlessly suffering for it all.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Publicity for Ubuntu 16.04 or around.
And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise.
We already have weird weather. It's the end of November and it's 15C outside (I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse od input parsing). It reached a deep low of about 8C earlier in the month. During the summer, the temperature varied between -2C and 26C in July.
Yesterday I was seeing wind speeds of up to 90mph in gusts and 60mph sustained, and today it is flat calm. In January we normally see sustained 120mph winds, but this year they were only about 90mph.
Although it's flat calm and warm and sunny now, in as little as ten minutes the weather could go to a hailstorm with high winds and the cloudbase at about treetop height, then clear up just as soon as it came.
Up here, this is all perfectly normal. It's just what it's like here.
"Weird weather", is it? Well, we'll see.
Global warming is encompassed in climate change, as is weird weather. You can disbelieve all you want but the climate doesn't care.
A destroyed climate is as bad for a hundred people as it is for 7 billion, so it would matter exactly as much.
Limit you all? LIMIT? Necessity is the mother of invention. If you feel limited by a need to invent, you're on the wrong site. Besides, what are these "limits" of which you speak? You can reduce pollution by increasing efficiency. Increased efficiency means you get more out for the same amount in (since you can't violate the law of conservation of matter and energy and therefore what would be pollutants are now something useful instead). That sounds like a recipe for profits, not limits.
Moving off coal and adopting nuclear fission (for now, fusion later) doesn't LIMIT you. You get much more power on the grid for less fuel and much less pollution. The miners won't be getting lung cancer or blown up in methane explosions, so saving lives and cutting medical (and rescue) expenses, all at the same time. Those freed-up people, if educated and retrained, could be a marvelous resource to tap into. The mistake made by many shifts in industry is to neglect the fact that humans are a powerful and valuable resource. Ignoring them limits your scope for imagination, exploration and development.
And let's examine that for a moment. Here's thousands, if not tens of thousands, of opportunities to try new things, explore new ideas and grow. Who but a fool would call that a limit?
Use the potential that change brings! Ignoring it and wasting it won't stop it, but it will limit what good can come from it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm in New York north of NYC, and Hurricane Irene passed through in August this year with rain the likes of which I have never seen outside of Florida. Then we had over 6 inches of snow before Halloween. Neither of which I have seen in my 40+ years of living here. Also, another strange thing I noticed; when I was a young kid all the leaves were off the trees by oct 31st, but that is getting later and later. Now it's at end of November early December before the trees are bare. In fact there are still quite a few leaves on the trees now. I am not sure why that is. When that early snow storm came through, it was a disaster because if the snow sticking to the leaves and making branches very heavy. We had widespread power loss. Lastly, spring and fall are very short now in terms of temperature. So indeed it think the weirdness has begun.
Years ago I climbed mount Bogong in February and there was a patch of snow close to the summit.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Because of global warming there is more heat in the atmosphere and more water vapor as well. That will lead to more energetic weather. This is an expected result.
Yea, people are too busy rebuilding their homes after tornadoes or worry about rising sea levels that will swallow their houses to believe in something as absurd as all that.
Of course! I mean, it's OBVIOUS to anyone with eyes that a medium-term cooling trend means warming is going on - ahem, did you forget to mention it's the hottest year on record? Any climate scientist worth his salt has computer simulations that would predict that and many other potentialities.
But I have to criticize your well-meaning retort which has sadly missed the mark. I'm here to help. I know what I'm about to say will be a tough pill, but I hope you will read it all and modulate your approach.
First of all, your meme is antiquated: it's "Climate Change" now. Even accidentally using the word "warming" could make people wonder whether we've got a clue about what's going on when you combine: the atmosphere, water cycle, dynamic solar radiation output, orbital wobble, stardust, magnetic field change, clouds, vegetation rotting on a planetary scale, volcanism, oceanic flows, etc - and then pile on the overwhelming inputs from man-made sources that dwarf all the rest. Only when you sufficiently take all of that into account and countless other variables would one be able to accurately predict the climate.
** BUT WE KNOW **! That's what you have to always stress in these conversations. We hold the one and only truth, our mathematical models for climate are practically world simulators. That's our secret weapon, we have the facts about settled climate science. 9 out of 10 our scientists agree, that's enough for me! The words "Climate Change" properly convey the complexity of our thoughts and the always-expanding sophistication of our computer models. The word 'warm' is no longer politically correct and must be removed from your vocabulary.
I'd also like to urge you to elevate the conversation more when you're making your points. If you've even got a prayer of changing the insufferable skeptics' minds, you must pepper in louder insults against their intelligence and add many more exclamation marks on your sentences with ALLCAPS!! Shame is a tool, you should feel no shame about shaming the bleary-eyed sheeple! Yell louder until they take notice!!!!
"Extremely naive"? Are you kidding me, is that all you've got? That is almost ... FRIENDLY talk! That piece of eurotrash garbage you deign to graciously instruct might have just walked away with a smile! What you gotta do is really shank the (holocaust) deniers in the back and twist it and then break it off! Maybe you were in a hurry when you wrote this, but for godssakes, we're talking about Gaia in crisis! We could literally have months before the seas evaporate! The computer models predict a very sharp spike in planetary temperatures approx. 5-75 years from now!!!!!!!
I just wanted to close by saying that we believe in you and we're pulling for you. Please, PLEASE become the bigmouth, hand-wringing, eco-religious, professorial douche you were born to be - it's for our own good!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, here it is.
We engage the warp drive on the hemp production. We will suck every drop of carbon out of the atmosphere with it. Seriously, we have our number one oxygen scrubber growling like a weed. Once upon a time hemp grew like a weed. It was a damn weed and it would grow out of control. It's a pain in the ass if you want to grow corn crops. It makes great rope, in fact we enacted farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. Then we said...no..no more hemp.
It seems the cotton industry hated it. Here is a WEED that people go grab for fibers then that they could weave for themselves cloths and such. Coupled with corn farmers they lobbied it as an evil South of the border thing. And they did their best to eradicate it. It also turned out that the jazz and blues musicians were smoking it in all of those wrong kind of places to be seen at as a decent Christian sort. They were able to demonize it even more with their lobbyists. Preachers thundered on about it, etc.
But lets look at the facts of the matter. This plant has some amazing qualities to it aside from deer and rabbits wanting to eat it like it's a delicacy to them. The seeds of this are from what I understand can be distilled into a petroleum. Yes, I thought that as well. Petroleum? Seriously?
Petro is a hydrocarbon. Correct? What do we have floating about fucking up our atmosphere? Carbon? What thrives on this stuff in the air? Plants? How about a plant that will chew this stuff up and store that carbon in it's seeds as energy for it's babies. Imagine harvesting those seeds for that hydrocarbon? Then you have a very strong fiber resulting from the harvest as well. There are various grades of this fiber to work with. First being very long strong straight strands, then of course pulp fiber which can be pressed into parchment paper such as what the US Constitution is wrote on. Imagine the image quality of a high quality ink printer photo on a paper that ages like our Constitution. I can't get that at Office Max, can you? Let me know if you do, I want to print off pirate maps on some. Arrgh!
Here is the solution. You legalize and authorize hemp production in the US. It has to be licensed and monitored by the Ag department, not the DEA. Don't worry, stoners will not be growing weed in it or near it. They will cry if they do because it will be allowed to massively pollinate with Midwestern native hemp, which will drop the THC levels into the ditch weed category. Not to mention it will become seedy as FUCK. Everyone hates seedy pot. If you go to smoke pot and there is a seed in the pipe or the joint, BOOM! I have seen seeds blow up in a pot pipe someone was smoking and blow all the pot out of it and give them a face full of burning weed. It wasn't like a grenade, it just startles the living crap out of them when it happens. As a kid, I would get a seed, hollow out the tobacco of a cigarette, drop a big fat juicy seed in it, then repack it. We've all sabotaged a smoker like that before, right?
As I digress...
Those same "blow the fuck up in your face, so you better clean them out, NOOB" seeds are the ones that you run through a high pressure roller press and collect the oil. We also have to do this scientifically to appease the most staunch of skeptics. First, it has to be grown by using a strong composing, we can do this by processing a lot of our waste. We can let it process a trashy swampy sewer-ed field into clay, instead of devouring crop land. You just have to engineer the fields according with EPA standards for a land fill situation. It's called, get out the bulldozers time and do some serious earth moving.
We can do some genetic experimentation with this to tweak it to grow insanely big and fast. Plants are amazingly fun to mess with on a genetic level, we have been doing it for quite a time now. We used to call it "breeding". There are an amazing variety of this plant that we can cross breed with. Take for example there is a breed of it in italy that grows 6 inches I day, I would say couple that with so
Take the Red Pill.
With seven billion people on the planet, and rapidly rising standards of living in China and other parts of Asia, with coal increasingly augmenting the petroleum plateau, I'd be shocked if every year didn't set a new record for CO2 emissions.
What would be unprecedented here is a global consensus among rich and poor, east and west in preventing business as usual from raising the bar on CO2 emissions every year for the next half century--which is exactly what would have happened had the earth's CO2 levels not been precisely balanced at a precarious tipping point as science presently tells the story. If we pull this off, we'll be manufacturing a political consensus out of whole cloth such as never before witnessed on this blue marble.
On another note, I don't get this beautification of scientific consensus as the second coming of fast food culture: science is, and always was, a slow food movement. It takes decades or centuries to reach secure conclusions concerning systems as complex as the earth's climate. I think this is a lot like a doctor who discovers a new disease model, then immediately proposes an extremely radical treatment of unknown severity and consequence.
Via Wikipedia:
Amputated at the thigh IIRC by another doctor who shows and takes responsibility. In the long run, these interventions become routine, and the consequences become understood and mitigated.
Is there any evidence that we can fundamentally shift the global economy away from fossil fuels on a radical program without incurring large and unknowable risks to geopolitical stability in doing so?
The paint is still wet on climate science. Be careful what you wish for. And don't write me off as a club foot surgery denier. The old day-glo Wired was my personal hot tub: I'm a card-carrying techno-optimist. Politically, however, I'm extremely wary about any combination of alacrity with wet paint. Apollo 13 was pretty much the historical high water mark on smooth sailing amidst a crash program instigated by handshakes among our political overlords.
Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl. Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots. But this doesn't provide evidence that CO2 increases warmth, it provide evidence that CO2 correlates with decreasing warmth.) Still, no one can predict climate in the best of times, much less now. Or weather. Yet, sometimes the climate does very unfriendly things. So it's the perfect bogy-man to point at if you want to scare money out of people, or distract them.
Having said that, yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions. And the good news is, we will -- quite naturally -- as we stop burning petroleum. And we will stop, because it's hard to get, appears to be running out, and we have to negotiate with crazy people to get enough, and alternate sources make more sense on many levels, and we'll be reducing our power consumption by increasing efficiency, a good example being by wide adoption of electric vehicles, which we'll have in great numbers very shortly -- VERY shortly if recent battery tech announcements (1,2) pan out. What we don't need to to is torque the economy (even further) out of shape to deal with an emergency that isn't here and which so far, no one has shown decisively to be incoming.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For England, most of the heat input is via the ocean currents. The oceans are extremely large and it takes a lot of heat to make any significant difference in temperature. England will notice changes in rainfall - as indeed it has - long before any other effect becomes noticeable. The delay resulting from the ocean will mask temperature changes in Britain up until the Atlantic Conveyer fails entirely. THEN, temperatures will drop somewhere between 20'F and 40'F.yes, drop. Global temperature refers to the mean temperature of the entire planet, deserts and all. It is NOT an addition you can just make to everything. It is an average. If Billy as a car and Mandy has a car, then Grim gives Mandy Billy's car pus one more, the average number of cars has gone up even though Billy is now sulking in a corner.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Awesome. Totally awesome. You made me spit coffee. :)))))
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
By "fewer" you mean "more". I take it you're on good terms with the Red Queen.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm in central Europe ... There's going to be snow on Christmas
Unless this "Europe" you are referring to is some village in Africa, what's so strange about that? Even in the warmest parts of Europe, in the southern part of that continent, it occasionally snows on Christmas.
Yes, very well said. Also, the corollary: You can believe all you want but the climate doesn't care.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nobody makes the obvious point.
Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes.
Great. And how is this different from before ? My grandfather left north holland because it became too cold. Before that I'm told that a few dambreaks (presumably caused either by storms, rising sea level, or in the worst case incompetence) cause my family to leave a place between Amsterdam and Zeeland. That's just the last 200 years, maybe less (I only have generations to go on, not years. And there sure were a lot of dambreaks in the 19th century).
This is not an exception. Just read this : http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/06/20-abandoned-cities-and-towns/.
That's again just the last century (and not all climate related, some are though). But going further back there's plenty of stuff. 2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest, filled with civilized black people (not arabs, who since exterminated them) who at one point dared attack Rome, and there was serious concern that campaign might succeed (and it did manage to cast aside 4 Roman legions, 3 in less time than it took the senate to notice their legions were gone, never mind decide what to do about it. They didn't do anything about it). The only reason there are Europeans in Europe is climate change in Eastern Asia. This is not news.
Where do we get the weird idea that climate was constant before today ? Where do we get the massive egocentric idea that it will start staying constant for us ? Gaia is a fickle godess that constantly slays things from houses, to cities, to entire states.
I am not saying that "there isn't something going on", but I do remember being taught how Darwinism categorizes species : adapt ... or die.
The whole strategy that seems to be pushed implicitly here seems to me a strategy that falls squarely in the latter category. Trying to keep things constant is not just a losing strategy, it's the way to extinction.
We don't have a big problem with acid rain any more because of these warnings and following drastic tightening of emission regulations for power plants and other large scale emitters.
The hope is that these worst-case predictions and scenarios for the climate change lead to the required actions to limit further C02 emissions best case or at least prepare to mitigate the effects on things like food and water supply, flooding and storms.
I suppose the "interesting" mod was given out for the actually interesting fact that someone can hold such a twisted view of reality without instantly dying of seizures caused by a brain trying to suicide in utter despair, not wanting to be the substrate on which such a warped mind runs, yes? That was it what you meant, mods, no?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
{Grin}
If they were to say something like, "The earth is a big place and there's all kinds of weird weather everywhere, every year, and it's been like that since the beginning of time, and the planet goes through regular cycles of long ice ages with short warm interglacial period in between, and we really don't know when the next ice age is gonna come, but there's not much we can do about it", there wouldn't be a reason for their existence and their jobs, is there?
It wouldn't fit the science, either.
You know, they don't pull this stuff out of there arses, unlike you.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
First it was "Global Warming", then when it became obvious that wasn't happening it was "Climate Change".
No.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=global+warming%2Cclimate+change&year_start=1970&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=3
Click the little linky thing.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm not defending the Anonymous Coward's statement but he was only off by about 20 years in his critique of the IPCC's original estimate of 2035.
But there haven't been bloody hot summers over the last ten years, yet everybody is talking about global warming - while we're just experiencing natural variation.
/. user says to prepare for weird posts...
The IPCC's 2035 statement was an error that they have admitted. That particular statement never got vetted by a glaciologist who would have known it was ridiculous. It was basically on the level of a typographical error, not a scientific error.
Nice graph, which deserves a caption of "Humans Warming to the topic".
Here's another linkie thing, more wiggly lines ... http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/30/article-2055191-0E974B4300000578-6_634x639.jpg Nice wiggles.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
What a screwed up world it is.
People started saying climate change instead of global warming because idiots focussed on the warming bit, not the global bit. Global temperatures went up, but if the local temperature went down so people said things like this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
Actually, since a few years the fossil fuel corporate monolith has seen itself more as an energy corporate monolith than specifically a fossil fuel one. They expect the post-peak oil world to be quite bad for business after a while (specially when it becomes "post-oil" due to oil simply ending), so they're already moving into other energy-related endeavors as a way to continue being the exact same powerhouses (pun intended) they currently are, only with different kinds of power behind their backs. Search around and you'll find that lots, and I mean lots, of research into alternative energy sources is currently financed by them. After all, first to arrive, and to sweetly, sweetly patent for 20 years (or more, with extensions), is the surest way to get ahead and continue dominating.
What doesn't mean they won't continue to milk the oil bandwagon for as long as they realistically can.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Sorry, here's a better citation. But it was not "on the level of a typographical error, not a scientific error" as you say. It was at least incompetence and at most intentionally misleading, even if well meaning.
So the report saying we are all completely fucked is actually criticized because things are much worse than it says?
Haven't seen any recommendations on what would be sufficient changes to reduce the greenhouse gases. IF they were to be implemented, what would these changes be, and how much would be enough?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Your "basic logic" has missed the part where being unable to formulate a trend for a 10 year period != having no access to the hundreds (ranging to millions, for some measures) of years of data that we have.
The GPs point was that while we may may need more than 10 years of data, we do have more than 10 years and we can draw trends from them.
"For the next 2 to 3 decades natural climate variations will be far more significant rather than any man made factors" - Prof Mike Hulme, CRU.
He's a credible source isn't he?
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
Pollution has effected the environment.You can see it first hand in Alaska.Normal healthy trees have been dying off.This has been a serious problem for years and little has been done about it. Lee Bergeron
Not to mention look up on Yahoo News the latest story on Solyndra (I believe the show is called marketwatch) where an author that actually looked at Obama's 'green tech initiative' found that out of TWENTY billion spent SIXTEEN billion was given to cronies like Al Gore, and that in many cases there wasn't even a review process! One company whose income last year was 13 million and which had NEVER made a profit got 1.3 BILLION with a B in money this year! The author then looked into the background of the company and found it a who's who of campaign donors.
What do this have to do with TFA? simply this, it really doesn't matter what IPCC or anyone else says about the weather as the scammers have come in and the ONLY thing that will get done is the transfer of money from your pocket to theirs, that's it. Anything else and they don't make massive profits by cranking out some panels in China and calling it "green" at a 4000% markup or get billions to build some plant in the desert. they know fear helps them scam money so the nastier things get the more they profit. they profit on food and water shortages, they profit on locking up the IP behind a bazillion patents, they profit by having your taxes diverted into their pockets.
The whole "green" thing, while once a noble idea about taking care of our planet, has become a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation where it frankly doesn't matter WHAT happens to the climate as those elite at the top make money on every possible angle. Oh and before anyone says i'm right wing watch Marketwatch, he names several Rs that likewise pocketed crazy amounts of money for their friends as well as had some nice insider trading going on, like Bacus from AZ that was shorting the economy after getting reports from Bernanke.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
im near aegean sea, a place where the climate has to be temperate, and it was 9 degrees celsius here yesterday. and in comparison, stockholm, a city that is next to goddamn arctic circle, was 8 degrees celsius yesterday.
we got cold streak in the middle of summer, hot streak in the middle of winter. we got everything. noone trusts weather or weather predictions anymore.
Read radical news here
I'm not so godawful impressed with the "geopolitical stability" at the moment, so maybe it's worth a shot, huh?
If the next few years sees the development of low-cost standalone energy systems, something like super-efficient solar systems or portable cold-fusion reactors or some such, where houses and businesses could be run off the grid, and a grid is no longer needed I can see it having a salutary effect on "geopolitical stability" especially if you throw the word "economic" in the middle of that.
(Note: I'm not suggesting anything about cold-fusion reactors except as a though experiment where energy could be created without having scarce resources sucked from miles beneath the earth's surface and transported thousands of miles and then burnt in huge, polluting energy factories where it is then transmitted to my house over miles of wires, either hanging in the sky like in the US or hidden in trenches under the ground like in Europe, and then connected to each house through a meter, whereby a company can charge me for each unit of energy that I use, just so I can turn on an lamp so I can read at night or make toast in the morning.
I can see the elimination of the need for fossil fuels being a very nice thing for the fucking "geopolitical stability" thank you very much.
It amazes me that the only thing a bunch of Slashdot technophiles can imagine for the reduction of CO2 is society's return to pre-industrial revolution lifestyles. These are the same people who are all for space tourism and quantum computing.
Knuckleheads.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not really the same thing. The global cooling hypothesis was only in a couple of papers and, unlike global warming, never received wide scientific support. It was however widely (and inaccurately) reported in the popular media.
You can read about it on (where else) wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Why not use all these storms to our advantage? Surely there must be a way to harness the energy in these storms, building a damn sturdy wind turbine for use in hurricanes. Or making some kind of water wheel of sorts to make some of that falling rain and snow actually do some work for a living, rather than sitting on it's ass for the rest of its life and making us do all the dirty work of moving it.
Mod parent up. More than 5. Anecdotes about weird weather mean literally nothing. It happens EVERY YEAR, in various parts of the planet. But it also happens in different places every year. />
My area had a record cold spring this year, and we now have about 6" of snow in mid-November, which is also unusual. Evidence of "climate change", one way or the other? Hell, no.
,br
I think you mean RIGHT-wing nut jobs.
I agreed with you right up until you said electric vehicles are good. The problem is in the USA in order to generate enough power to recharge electric vehicles we will need more power plants. Power which comes from COAL, which increases CO2 emissions.
Battery powered electric cars will increase CO2 emissions drastically. Fuel cell Electric is better however the only place to get that kind of hydrogen is water, which requires large coal burning power plants to break the hydrogen oxygen bonds.
I have yet to see anyone propose a standard that actually doesn't use more electricity(which comes from coal) to create a cleaner future.
Remember Nuclear is big & scary see fukishima for more information
Solar only works in part of the country, and for less than 50% of the day,
Wind is at best 25% efficient over the course of a year.
Geothermal works in some places but not enough.
So to create power where power is needed you need to burn coal which releases co2
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
What does this global warming shit have to do with technology (or geek culture, insofar as those tasteless dweebs can be said to have any)? Why is this crap being reported at Slashdot?
This really comes down to the fact that you have ALL nations not wanting to make economic sacrifices while at the same time, we have China in a cold war with the west via economic means. There are 2 solutions for this:
1) accept that we will have climage change and see where we go.
2) Do something that forces ALL NATIONS TO CHANGE AT THE SAME TIME.
Now, America is NOT going to change unless we see that nations like China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to change. China has already indicated that they will not change. They keep saying that this is about output / person, which is a false measure. So, how to change this? HAVE NATIONS PUT A TAX ON ALL MANUFACTURED GOODS PREDICATED ON CO2 FROM WHERE IT (and parts) CAME from. That tax should rise steadily to give nations time to adjust. OCO2 is about to go up. This sat measures CO2 in the atmosphere. This will give us a true measure of CO2 that is flowing in/out from a nation. That will make it possible for us to have true values to work with. That will almost certainly mean that many nations and even unexpected areas are going to show up as emitting far far more than what they expected. By doing a tax on ALL goods, we will see nations change quickly. The reason is because it is economically better to do that, then not.
The one issue is how to apply it. Many will argue for CO2 per capita. That is one of the WORST measures going. The reason is that nations will cheat in their reporting. In addition, it rewards nations that have not controlled their population. In addition, CO2 output is NOT correlated with populations. Far from it.
I have argued that the fairest and sanest would be per sq km. The reason is that the size of land is fixed and can be seen from space. Likewise Ag is a major CO2 emitter. But probably the worst output is a correlation with economic output. Most of man's CO2 output is far more related to economics.
As such, it makes sense to look at it in terms of CO2 per $ of GPD or CO2 per land rather than per capitia.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You're sure it wasn't just a blanket of dead moths? Those damn things pile up everywhere.
Blank until
Anyone doubting climate change is burying their head in the sand. Its here. Its happened, its happening and it will continue to happen. The best we can do is slow it down and try to minimise the damage that we have already caused. Articles like this shouldn't even be making news. But we have so completely denied the problem for so long. One wonders whos best interests are at heart. Sure the earth is constantly evolving and changing, and this is just part of that evolution. But whos to say whether the end of humanity is not part of that evolution, too. At the very least the quality of life for morst people will be lessened. Yes some places will benefit, but the vast majority of the popultation will not. and we will end up spending more money controling the effects tha prevention would have cost in the first place. But forward thinking doesnt win elections. what a sorry lot we are.
What is new is attribution of severe weather events to human activity. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20111110_NewClimateDice.pdf
When heatwave deaths are your fault, it is time to take corrective action.
Also, you are incorrect that trying to keep things steady is the way to extinction. This is some Frank Herbert meme but it has no basis. Beavers keep pond water levels constant and do just fine.
Aww yes, nothing is happening and we can't do anything about it if it was happening. Same old bullshit story (or non story).
Maybe you think weather patterns are not leading indicators of climate change, but they are the canary in the coal mine as harbingers of what's to come.
Second point-no need to do anything about emissions cause the economy is just too damn scary. Here's a newsflash that you might not have completely thought through-when is it going to become too expensive to rebuild the communities that get hit by tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme snowfall, etc? Think about it, billions to rebuild entire towns/cities in this economy. Soon we will decide whether if your home is worthwhile to rebuild or just creat a greenspace.
P.S. I live in New Orleans and know of the expense and toil of what I speak.
Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
Paraphrasing Mark Twain, it was darkness for billions of years before I was born and it didn't bother me a bit.
People die. We are not immortal. But to claim that we don't have to worry about a poison gas cloud coming our way because people die anyway is ludicrous. The argument that X happens naturally, therefore we need not be concerned about X, only appeals to those who want to dismiss a topic they find uncomfortable to deal with.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
News flash! The shit has happened before and will happen again. I live in North Alabama Home of the F5 that wiped out 3 cities including MINE! It also was hit in 1974 just not as bad. I was there for that one too. If you want to reduce co2 cut a tree down!
News Flash to you!! It costs more to rebuild today (which is my point). Just thought you might have missed that point being you are from Ala.
When next one hits maybe the citizens of day Ohio says OK enough rebuilding this backward redneck haven, I want my money to do somewhere else they aren't worth it.
Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
It will mean more forest fires, which are very damaging. Not to mention more drought for the prairies. The ecosystems are quite delicate.
That is what we said about New Orleans why waste the money. Just fill in the hole and be done with it.
It must be true!!
Everyone with half a brain knows there is climate change happening. We have significantly more data than 10 years. In fact, NASA just launch their most advanced climate satellite last week that will give us thousands of terabits of data per DAY! --- not that any of this will mean much to deniers of the scientific process such as yourself.
HUMANS chop down all the forests, HUMANS divert the flow of water on a geologic scale, HUMANS alter local weather patters through massive emissions of pollutants. See a pattern?
Sorry to say, but in the western democracies of the world, the vast majority of politicians and business leaders are not Mensa members. We have the answers now, we just need to tweak a few policies. No 'mensa geniuses' necessary
Last week that should increase weather accuracy from 5 to 7 days. That is progress!
People have known that we'd have weird weather and other events in these days for a long time. Written about 1600 years ago (or, if you don't believe that, in 1829) in the Book of Mormon: "Yea, [there] shall come...a day when there shall be heard of fires, and tempests, and vapors of smoke in foreign lands; And there shall also be heard of wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes in divers places. Yea, [there] shall come...a day when there shall be great pollutions upon the face of the earth; there shall be murders, and robbing, and lying, and deceivings." (Moroni 8:29-31).
Or, if you prefer the Bible: "And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows." (Mark 13:7-8).
I'm not saying we should encourage climate change, we need to do more to reduce our negative effects on the environment and climate, but people knew this was going to happen, a long time before people understood the science of it (not that we really do yet).
You mean the acid rain that was stopped by Reagan's cap and trade treaty on sulphur emissions?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I would wager that this is affected more by a greater number of people building houses in severe weather areas than an increase in the number and severity of the weather events. Yes, changes in weather will make a change here, but the number of "targets" in a given area has changed much more rapidly than the weather(climate) changes.
I find it hilarious that the press seems to focus on "most expensive [weather event] in history" as a measure of the severity of the weather event instead of a measure of population density.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
It might make it snow more, or rain more, or rain less, or get hotter, or get colder, or create more hurricanes, or make them more intense, or.... we'll tell you which after they happen.
You mean the researchers who claim they were skeptics but were really true believers for decades?
Which just goes to show that climate researchers can't model greenhouse gas production any better than its effects.
So you've solved all the engineering problems associated with these? Not to mention the political and logistic ones? If not, that's a definition of "easily" that doesn't mesh so well with the common meaning.
Ha, ha, ha. Fusion's been right over the horizon for longer than I've been alive. It's right up there with practical flying cars.
The fundamental impediment has been that fossil fuels work like nothing else does. The lesser impediments are that the alternatives tend to be just as unacceptable to those who oppose fossil fuels on environmental grounds, and much more expensive. High altitude wind? There's fewer good sites than you might think, and the problems with building there and the necessary infrastucture are not small. Space based solar? Forget it, our space capabilities aren't up to it. Small thorium reactors? No, nuclear is not going anywhere. High performance hydrogen fuel cells? First you've got to invent some practical ones, then solve the problems associated with hydrogen -- where are you going to get it, how do you transport and store ite, etc. Advanced power storage technologies... yeah, want to get rich? Invent an electrical power storage technology with the power and energy density of gasoline. Or even a third of that.
The whole "1970's ice age" thing is based on a half truth and misdirection. Before Nixon's clean air act it was a bit of a toss up between warming from GHG's and cooling from aerosols (mainly sulphur that was also causing acid rain). Regan permanently fixed the sulphur problem with a cap and trade system in the early 90's, so now it's mostly warming from GHG's but still a bit of short term cooling from smog. This graph shows the best guesstimates of various forgings.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Last time I ran the numbers on the Tesla roadster, a Tesla powered by 100% coal-derived electricity would be responsible for half the CO2 of a gasoline-powered car getting 30mpg. So, no, battery powered electric cars won't increase CO2 emissions drastically.
It was a member of the IPCC who picked up the error, a bit late maybe, but still the process caught it. The IPCC is nothing more than a giant peer-review process, the reports they write are their evidence and summaries and are generally conservative in their statements due to the difficulty of getting a large number of experts to agree.Their budget is ~$5M/yr soureced from hundreds of nations of all political colours, the money is spent mainly on conference rooms and planes, no scientist is paid a dime by the IPCC for their work on the reports. I cannot think of another scientific question that has been put to such a rigorous bullshit filter. The remarkably small number of real errors that have found their way into the final reports over the last 20yrs is a testament to their accuracy. The 90,000 review comments and answers for their last set of reports are also available somewhere on the site..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl.
No climate isn't static and no scientist claims it is. However, WE have adapted to a particular climate and expect it to stay within norms to survive. Changes in the climate can have devastating effects to regions not prepared to deal with them.
As to your examples, a dry spell isn't climate change. The dust bowl wasn't climate change either. Those were both weather events.
Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots.
Your claim of CO2 lagging warming is nonsense and has been thoroughly debunked. Also, plants do no make CO2, they consume it. Conditions millions of years ago have jack to do with our current climate. Different albedos, land mass configurations, etc. .
But this doesn't provide evidence that CO2 increases warmth, it provide evidence that CO2 correlates with decreasing warmth.
Really? And what is your scientific research backing up such a ridiculous claim? It seems all the peer-reviewed science says the exact opposite. Let me guess, you're a conspiracy nut, right?
Still, no one can predict climate in the best of times, much less now.
Of course, since you're clearly an expert on the subject. Climate is much easier to predict than weather.
Yet, sometimes the climate does very unfriendly things.
Yes it does, usually over 100's or 1000's of years which is usually enough time for adaptation. Sudden changes have had some rather nasty side effects in the past. The changes we are seeing now are happening with a lifetime or two. At best, that should raise some concern. It wouldn't take much change to render the US into a nation full of starving people for example. Shift the jet stream north and suddenly the nations breadbasket turns into a desert.
So it's the perfect bogy-man to point at if you want to scare money out of people, or distract them.
You're confusing terrorism and climate science. Terrorism is an ill-defined nebulous threat with about as much real threat as you being struck by a bolt of lightning on any given day. Climate science is a well researched topics that has made many verifiable predictions and has a huge amount of data and research backing it up.
Having said that, yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions. And the good news is, we will -- quite naturally -- as we stop burning petroleum. And we will stop, because it's hard to get, appears to be running out, and we have to negotiate with crazy people to get enough, and alternate sources make more sense on many levels, and we'll be reducing our power consumption by increasing efficiency, a good example being by wide adoption of electric vehicles, which we'll have in great numbers very shortly -- VERY shortly if recent battery tech announcements (1,2) pan out. What we don't need to to is torque the economy (even further) out of shape to deal with an emergency that isn't here and which so far, no one has shown decisively to be incoming.
The point is that if we keep burning fossil fuels until they get too expensive to use we will just make the situation worse. It's not just oil. It's also coal, natural gas, and any other carbon based fuel source that isn't carbon neutral. None of these are going away any time soon.
But clearly, no amount of scientific research will convince you otherwise, so we'll just wait and see what happens over the next decade or so.
~X~
Yes, climate changes. But while we don't know if we are causing it, we can make a pretty good guess that adding all this CO2 and other nasties into the environment isn't going to help anything.
You say CO2 increases lag warm periods. Well, plants like warm weather and they eat CO2 and sequester it into the dirt. Cool off the weather and you get less plants and they eat less CO2. That aspect of the system was in dynamic equilibrium. The concern is that poking that with more CO2 will change the dynamics.
I think "miles per gallon" is a clue that it is measured in fuel input per miles, not some magical fuel over time to empty calculation.
And even if it does break even, it is easier to capture the CO2 at the coal plant than it is at the tailpipe.
You mean a corrupt governments who knew the sea walls and levies needed to be vastly improved to withstand a category 4 or 5 storm for the past 30+ years and yet did nothing and chose to spend the money to do so on other things may have had a little part to play in what happened to New Orleans? I mean that would have nothing to do with the fact that billions of dollars worth of infrastructure was destroyed.
There was plenty of blame to go around in New Orleans, but climate change was not the root cause of that disaster being as bad as it was. Everyone knew that large hurricanes had happened before, although be it rare, and would happen again, but most were betting "not on my watch" and didn't do anything about it. So they kicked the can down the road and eventually one of those perfect storms came and...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Cut a tree down? You know that plants eat CO2, right? That's what made Earth viable for animal life. Plants inhale CO2 and exhale O2. Animals do the opposite.
I personally am moving the place known as [MISSING]. It's probably the only place in the world unaffected by climate change and one of the places whose temperature records are used by B.E.S.T. in their ground breaking, earth shattering, unimpeachable sciency thing.
I have yet to see anyone propose a standard that actually doesn't use more electricity(which comes from coal) to create a cleaner future.
Everywhere else, people are moving towards electricity for a cleaner future.
There are plenty of ways of generating clean electricity: nuclear, wind, tidal, biomass, hydro, solar ... even, if they get the budgets right,
"clean" coal with carbon capture (from what i've seen, I think the tech. works, but not the finances).
Secondly, even with mainline coal-powered generation, greater generation efficiency can mean that coal-powered electrical vehicles
create less co2/km than gasoline.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
The atmosphere is much more complicated than you make it seem to be for one simple reason: the latent heat of phase changes. It takes a LOT of energy to make it rain a little more. It takes a LOT of energy to melt a glacier. When you start seeing that happen, you know there is a LOT more energy floating around in the atmosphere and getting rained down onto other places that aren't used to having that energy rained down upon them.
It isn't that Foolish Human Scientists are making it up as the go along, as the various "skeptics" imply, but that they are constantly learning and refining the models. So yes, the earth trapping more heat can mean that it is colder one place than in another. For example: you have the sun warming the ocean, evaporating water to the skies. It then travels to colder inland places and deposits that energy, warming them up. Now, add some CO2 into the atmosphere and you cause that rainstorm to have more energy wanting to escape. Instead of traveling across the continent dropping energy along its way, it rains more in the coastal areas and less inland. The coastal areas are warmer, inland areas are colder.
Ok, now you have an edge case. That moist, energetic airmass was going to make it rain in the plains. But, because the added CO2 made that airmass warmer than it would have been, it rains more in the coastal area and by the time it gets to the plains, it doesn't have enough energy to counteract the cold airmass and you get 6 inches of snow instead of an inch of rain. Now, not only is it colder in the plains, that white snow on the ground reflects heat back up into the atmosphere. Your ground is colder, delaying the planting season ever so slightly. Your atmosphere is warmer, moving up to the north pole where it melts the ice.
Is there any evidence that we can fundamentally shift the global economy away from fossil fuels on a radical program without incurring large and unknowable risks to geopolitical stability in doing so?
No, but there is evidence that not doing so will cause even worse geopolitical stability.
... of vague predictions by the Global warming/climate change group that can't seem to figure out exactly what is going to happen and when and produce quotes that can be used no matter what happens to the weather. Kinda like their recent hurricane predictions. Oh wait .. those didn't pan out.
.. we need to decrease emissions. But until someone somewhere can start making somewhat accurate predictions, I'm not willing to toss our economy down the tubes. We learned not too long ago that wind turbines impact local climate, creating hot spots. Everything we do impacts the environment. Everything any living thing does impacts the environment, THAT is a fact.
Yes
It's been a few degrees (Fahrenheit) above normal in Phoenix this fall, and we have LOVED it. I'd take a few extra degrees in the three months of summer for some of this beautiful weather year the other 9. Some areas may become uninhabitable, but others will become more habitable. I notice the GW/CCG group never balances out the bad stuff with the good stuff, hardly an unbiased bit of reporting there.
Whether or not it is beneficial or harmful is the issue. So some guy in Bongo-Pongo has to move his house on sticks that he has to rebuild every time a hurricane comes through. Or Long Island needs to build a dike and install massive pumping systems like Holland and New Orleans as done. These are costs that can be spread out over time.
Provided that some day, the GWS/CCG folks can actually predict with accuracy when they will be needed. Until that day, I'm doing my best to cut back electrical usage, replace old appliances with more efficient ones as they age, and I even use a CFL or two. I'm even considering looking for a job within 10 miles of my house so I can at least ride a bicycle once in a while and not use as much gas.
But I'm not giving up my truck I drive less than 5,000 miles a year, and when it dies, I will buy a bigger one. Because I need it and use it and enjoy it.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I think life will go on just fine. During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of extreme global warming, there was rapid diversification of terrestrial life.
Well duh. When you have a dynamic system, the periodic variations will always be greater than the trend. Man made contributions to the climate may well be miniscule. But they exist- 7 billion monkeys burning carbon-based fuels adds something to the equation that wasn't there in the past. It's like compound interest. "Oh, I'm making 0.01%! Big deal, I profit more finding a penny on the sidewalk." But in 100 years, you've got an extra dollar plus all the pennies you found.
Why are you saying CO2 is "nasty"? It's the whole basis for our co-existence together with plants.
Also, it's been order of magnitudes higher without ill effects before. Why should it suddenly change the dynamics now?
"[spittle encrusted sputter]!"
Signed,
Current know-nothing-republicans.
"Prepare for weird weather" is sort of like saying "your odds of winning the lottery just got worse, prepare to lose more." OK THANKS!!!!
I doubt it. Empty words like that don't work against demographic trends, and the fact is that as nations get richer, their birth rates decline. The USA is only barely above replacement, and the nation of Italy is well below replacement rates. So much for RIGHT wing nutjobs and religious fools, eh?
Perhaps you could learn to hate people less?
Prepare for weird weather?! Seriously?
Say "prepare for weird weather" at the beginning of every year for all eternity and you'd be spot-on.
Climate is always changing. Weather is always weird. We don't need a panel to tell us the obvious. Please go do something useful instead.
Uhhh..... The IPCC doesn't pull stuff out of their asses? When did they stop they highly publicized activity? Yesterday?
the IPCC can't be specific because they only pull models out of their decades-old immense pile of useless ones after the fact, "cooking the books." They are controlled by agenda of their benefactors.
Yes, fear-mongering is the best method for rational discourse and social change. OK, it's only the favored method for some organizations. I believe the 'hope' has a helluva lot more to do with money than the security of mankind. Just my paranoia about the UN, an organization long known for cronyism, fraud and outright support of such wonderful folks as Syria, Libya, Hamas, .........
The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
You mean we need to hijack our government to ban fossil fuel production and throw more money at some other industries? Not sure that's really going to work like you think it will.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The IPCC predicted we'd have 50 million climate refugees by the year 2010. Have you seen them, yet?
Large trees prevent smaller trees from growing. Cut down the large tree, treat its wood, let the smaller plants grow.
Sorry, were you under the impression that you're paying a lot of taxes these days?
Well, that's how it goes nowadays. If it gets extremely hot, then it's global warming^W^W climate change fault. Same if it gets really cold. Whatever weather event you have, they say it's a climate problem due to AGW. As there will always be weak enough minds to believe such crap, it will go on and on and on...
Climate is much easier to predict than weather.
No, it's NOT!
I was alive then why do i have to read about it after the fact?
I'm still waiting for the super hurricanes they predicted a few years ago.
I guess if you predict something ambiguiously enough, eventually it will come true.
Here here. Woodland Management is key and in a few reports heading in the right direction now for most of Europe. Old trees can actually give off methane since they can be in a state of decay whilst still perfectly healthy, though they are very good for bio-deversity bugs and stuff which birds and small mammals go nuts for.
In the UK "Ancient Woodland" means over 400 years old. There is no woodland in the UK that has been identified that has not been under active management by humans prior to this at some point. Manage your woods replant or support regeneration plant a mix of softwood to be treated and durable hard woods for carbon lockup and a mix of short rotation coppice for bio-fuels (wood chip), all of which can be integrated into a woodland management plan, provide a living for foresters.
Leaving Trees standing and un-managed would be detrimental to the environment in the UK at least.
Sadly there is a movement for woodburners to be installed in houses and HETAS approved KILN DRIED fire wood sold to suppy them. Shows the economy is still more powerful than common sense.
Because you remember the popular press coverage and not the science, and consequently don't know what the fuck you're talking about?
I'm 46, I remember seeing TV specials about snowball earth. Read the wikipedia article, it's interesting and won't take you long.
Climate is much easier to predict than weather.
No, it's NOT!
Indeed. It's a scale-free system.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The process never caught it. It took nearly 4 years after the original release for it to get 'caught' and after it was caught, it was found to be a Greenpeace propaganda piece.
Om, nomnomnom...
As I recall, there have been a number of scientists who have left IPCC after their contributions (papers and conclusions?) were rewritten between the time that they were accepted and the final release of the report without their permission, changing the stated result to fit the political wind. One of them was Svensmark IIRC.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Not only that, but it is a giant peer review process that has to make it's reports at least nominally politically palatable. That tends to skew their predictions towards the benign (the Himalaya-glacier-ending mistake notwithstanding).
Kinda scary, actually. Things are likely to be much worse than what the IPCC can get away with saying.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"In Search Of... The Coming Ice Age":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ndHwW8psR8
Canada grows a ton of wheat. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba all have major wheat growing operations (other things too). Some of my cousins are indeed farmers up in Canada. Wheat isn't all that Canada grows, but it is a big crop there.
Great now they can point to any weird weather and say see climate change. Where I live in Nova Scotia there was a mile of ice above where I am now 12,000 years ago. Did the cave men and their camp fires melt all that ice. Millions of years ago it was also hard core jungle. I guess that was caused by dinosaur farts. The climate changes all the time. Get used to it. (Evolve or die.)
When did he say that? I can believe natural variation overwhelming the climate signal for a couple of decades but probably not three.
Give credit where it is due, Chicken Little, Thailand floods are purely anthropogenic in nature -- a result of deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existing city planning, not global warming.
And you don't think deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existent city planning contribute to global warming? Which could contribute to flooding?
The climate change skeptics on slashdot need to learn some ecology before they go spouting off about what could and couldn't be causes or effects of global warming.
And while I'm ranting, I can't believe the idiots who say they're climate change 'skeptics' because the 'appropriate use of the scientific method' is to be skeptical until things are proven. That's dead wrong. Science is about basing your opinions, and your future tests, on what the current data says is most probable. You follow the data. Systematic skepticism is just as intellectually dishonest as systematic credulity. The only proper application of science to belief and politics is to do and believe today according to what the data suggests is most probable today, while doing your best to prepare more data for tomorrow.
That's a good point. The IPCC report is watered down by the political realities of producing it.
It should also be pointed out that the Himalayan glacier error was in the Working Group II report, the report on the effects of climate change which by its very nature is a bit speculative. I'm not aware of any errors of that nature that have been found in the Working Group I report, the report on the scientific basis for climate change.
Some in the scientific community have taken the possibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming seriously since the 1950's. I believe there was a paper on the possibilities in 1957. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson got a briefing on the subject. I've taken it seriously since the late 1980's. Just because you're late to the party doesn't mean it hasn't been going on for a while.
"Your "basic logic" has missed the part where being unable to formulate a trend for a 10 year period != having no access to the hundreds (ranging to millions, for some measures) of years of data that we have."
My comment had nothing to do with warming per se. We know that is going on, and anybody who denies it is probably foolish.
My comment had to do only with "anthropogenic" warming. Which I could have made more clear. Nevertheless, it was not a "troll" comment... somebody was using "troll" to mean "I disagree" again. Which makes them bad Slashdot citizens.
This is the point: "Anthropogenic Global Warming" has not been a serious or much-studied theory until recently... the last 10 years or so. That means that the "pro" side must also wait for those same 17 years to be sure their data is not "noise".
And I'm not talking about historic data, I'm talking about predictions. According to the AGW proponents themselves, there has not been enough time to confirm their models, and separate the predictions made by those models from "noise". You can't have that both ways. If you are trying to, your logic is fundamentally flawed.
Yes... well before the "global cooling" scare that took place in the 70s, supported by many scientists.
You cannot validly connect the two. The data today is far different than it was then, as are the theories and the models.
I mean, seriously. The idea of a laser was first postulated hundreds of years ago... that doesn't mean that it had anything at all to do with the quantum theory that first enabled its construction a mere few decades ago.
It's something of a relief to know that I am not the only one who recognizes this. I keep pointing it (and other facts) out, only to usually get modded down as "troll" when I do. It seems Slashdot readers, as a whole, are no less biased and media-hypnotized than the general population.
Isn't the IPCC report consider and has been considered a 'respectable' presentation of scientific fact that has been peer reviewed, to make policy decisions on? I thought so. Indeed it has. And it has a track record of being wrong, not once, not twice, but several dozen times.
Oh and of course there's no shortage of respectable journals which have used the IPCC as a source for these inaccuracies, and reprinted them as fact.
With the conference in Durban fast approaching, 20k attention whores are in full swing again, drowsing the gullible media with a hurricane of alarmism to justify their paid holiday.
I'm not a coward by any name.
If you go back just a couple thousand years and look at weather extremes, you will that some of the swings were worse than today. The Texas drought - there have been Texas droughts that last 100 years! Climate always as changed and always will change and there is nothing humans can do about it but learn to live with. The socialist junk science researchers of today ignore everything no from 1990-2000! The earth has actually been cooling the last 10 years as the BEST data showed. Your local paper might not have told you that as the fraudsters release of the data compressed the graph for the last ten years. His co-author blew the whistle on the lying scumbag.
Isn't the IPCC report consider and has been considered a 'respectable' presentation of scientific fact that has been peer reviewed, to make policy decisions on? I thought so. Indeed it has. And it has a track record of being wrong, not once, not twice, but several dozen times.
Oh and of course there's no shortage of respectable journals which have used the IPCC as a source for these inaccuracies, and reprinted them as fact.
Whoa, slow down the trolling.... The question was: Can you point to even a single article published in a respectable scientific journal that claimed that "New York city would be buried under ice as part of the new ice age to be here by the year 2000. That was in the 70's...".
The IPCC didn't exist in the 1970's.
On the topic of the IPCC, some inaccurate statements are almost inevitable in a report of many thousands of pages. The fact that it took years to even notice the inaccuracies is an indication of how important they are to the main conclusions.
From 1965 to 1979 there were 44 papers published on global warming as opposed to 7 on global cooling. Clearly there was more support for global warming then.
none of you have a clue, but strangely you think you do!
First of all, as they grow out of the kindergarden & glance at the world, they realize that : ... think Dalai Lama's Tibet & world politics)
1) Generosity/selflessness doesn't pay (mother theresa was basically broke, and most people clapped their hands while stepping aside of the problems she tried to pinpoint
2) The best way to put yourself & significant others out of harm's way (including by birth nation's politics) is to make/have tons of money & keeping an eye on trouble that may head your way
3) Scientists & inventors mostly make ridiculously small amount of money & focus generally very narrowly on their pet fields of interest (thanks to the defunct education systems ever since governments realized 1960s-like litterate people where a danger to their society)
4) Mensa & the like are really only interested in solving *mathematical* puzzles, *not* real-world ones
Having done such this looking at the world, I'd say *really clever* people go on with their lives pursuing careers in business, finance, politics (the fill-your-pockets-with-legalized-bribes version, not make-the-world-a-better-place one). All in all, worthless jobs, considering what they could achieve for the rest of the world.
If one is hoping for *smart* people to fix the accumulated pollution, corruption, intolerance, bigotry, and so forth, I'd guess they are looking in the wrong direction : autistic persons, part-genious (come up with ideas), part-dumb (ignore that it's said to be impossible & forget how the economy is holding everyone's balls) is our best bet, with the *hope* that the amount of people on this planet is not the underlying agenda (Georgia guidestones ?), combined with classified/unnoticed/covert climate-worsening technologies.
Because apparently, no government who is currently blasting the ionosphere and heating it up with the ELF and VLF radio waves intends to stop.. apparently ever, until of course we are all goose meat and they themselves are feeling all cozy, buried 2500 feet down in their 1,000,000 sq ft bunker life support facilities, and playing chess with their grandsons.. and/ or granddaughters. Thank you very much.
Intelligent people can't build a shed, simply becaused they didn't learn how to do it. Given time & books, they'll even understand global energy dynamics (if at all it's a solved problem). Depth of knowledge is intelligence's key; that is schooling system's way.
Clever people will come up with ideas from whatever they used to do & build a sturdied shed using methods, or in places you wouldn't have thought of. Breadth of knowledge is essential there; that is playfull kids' way (and, maybe, 15th century education).
How many uses can you think of for a paper-clip ? Toddlers' can come up with thousands, but current brands of education narrows it down to a few dozens after age 25.
I'll see that graph with wriggly lines and raise you an animated graph with wriggly lines:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/11/16/it-hasnt-warmed-since%E2%80%A6/
It isn't just our fuel, it's our food. The UN FAO reported that animal agriculture contributes more to global warming than the entire transport sector combined. Plant based diets are an easy short term solution as we develop long term solutions to energy production.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM
Plant based diets have the added effect of being healthier, reducing local air and water pollution, and reducing ethical concerns over animal welfare.
Due to parent posting as AC, and someone who meta-modded it down (in effect, being worse than Anonymous Coward, using mod points to indicate "I disagree", I have seen it fit to re-post this as a full-on quote. So it will take at least 2 more Anonymous Modding Cowards to bury this again.
Of course! I mean, it's OBVIOUS to anyone with eyes that a medium-term cooling trend means warming is going on - ahem, did you forget to mention it's the hottest year on record? Any climate scientist worth his salt has computer simulations that would predict that and many other potentialities.
... FRIENDLY talk! That piece of eurotrash garbage you deign to graciously instruct might have just walked away with a smile! What you gotta do is really shank the (holocaust) deniers in the back and twist it and then break it off! Maybe you were in a hurry when you wrote this, but for godssakes, we're talking about Gaia in crisis! We could literally have months before the seas evaporate! The computer models predict a very sharp spike in planetary temperatures approx. 5-75 years from now!!!!!!!
But I have to criticize your well-meaning retort which has sadly missed the mark. I'm here to help. I know what I'm about to say will be a tough pill, but I hope you will read it all and modulate your approach.
First of all, your meme is antiquated: it's "Climate Change" now. Even accidentally using the word "warming" could make people wonder whether we've got a clue about what's going on when you combine: the atmosphere, water cycle, dynamic solar radiation output, orbital wobble, stardust, magnetic field change, clouds, vegetation rotting on a planetary scale, volcanism, oceanic flows, etc - and then pile on the overwhelming inputs from man-made sources that dwarf all the rest. Only when you sufficiently take all of that into account and countless other variables would one be able to accurately predict the climate.
** BUT WE KNOW **! That's what you have to always stress in these conversations. We hold the one and only truth, our mathematical models for climate are practically world simulators. That's our secret weapon, we have the facts about settled climate science. 9 out of 10 our scientists agree, that's enough for me! The words "Climate Change" properly convey the complexity of our thoughts and the always-expanding sophistication of our computer models. The word 'warm' is no longer politically correct and must be removed from your vocabulary.
I'd also like to urge you to elevate the conversation more when you're making your points. If you've even got a prayer of changing the insufferable skeptics' minds, you must pepper in louder insults against their intelligence and add many more exclamation marks on your sentences with ALLCAPS!! Shame is a tool, you should feel no shame about shaming the bleary-eyed sheeple! Yell louder until they take notice!!!!
"Extremely naive"? Are you kidding me, is that all you've got? That is almost
I just wanted to close by saying that we believe in you and we're pulling for you. Please, PLEASE become the bigmouth, hand-wringing, eco-religious, professorial douche you were born to be - it's for our own good!!!!!!!!!!
Dear parent poster: get a name. This was worthy.
Fixed the spacing for you. Don't forget the line breaks when quoting...
Actually if the water cools of it will dissolve considerably more CO2 into it than warmer water does, the same as a cold soda pop doesn't fizz as much as a warm one does; when atmospheric CO2 hits 172 ppm we get glaciers kilometers thick, when CO2 hits 150 ppm plants can't utilize CO2 and everything on Earth dies except for possible some deep sea creatures.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's already been 15 years, and this year we clearly into a La Nina phase, so this winter (or summer if you a southerner) is going to be cold and snowy just like last year. it's more plausible that a LIA, Little Ice Age, is going to happen than a MWP, Medieval Warm Period.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
At that time I Could go outside the door and jump on our snowmobile and go for a ride, In High school I worked in the tow both at a ski area for spending money and free skiing and it was much colder and snowier in the 1960 and 1970 than it was in the 1980 and 90's. It was much more plausible in the public's mind that some kind of mini ice age was coming. In the nineties, if I wanted to go from a snowmobile ride I had to drive 200 miles north to find decent snow and this global warming was much more plausible in the public's mind. Guess what kiddies the climate has a quasi-periodic temperature oscillations of 30, 60 and 120 years; the sun has a sun-spot cycle of 22 years and everything is in a down cycle so expect it to be cool for a while.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You know, they don't pull this stuff out of there arses, unlike you.
it's computer model, they pull it out of computer models, so they have to be right because they use computers and everything. Everybody knows if you ask a computer an illogical question it starts spitting out lightening bolts and explodes and since there aren't computers blowing up all over the place they have to be right because they use computers and everything.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The IPCC's 2035 statement was an error that they have admitted. That particular statement never got vetted by a glaciologist who would have known it was ridiculous. It was basically on the level of a typographical error, not a scientific error.
I would consider that in it's self to be symptomatic of a lack of scientific rigor, the IPCC reports have numerous examples of NGO's inserting their propaganda into it that isn't peer reviewed. How does one get to be an editor of the IPCC, popularity contest?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
But you're wrong. Most electrics will recharge at night, when most of the grid's capacity is wasted. We don't need new power plants at all. If we need anything, it'll be heavier wiring in some places, that's all, because residential areas that pull power like industrial areas aren't really part of the current design.
No, they won't. For one thing, the power EV's use is much more efficiently created by power plant turbines than with individual engines. This means that considerably less fuel is burned -- even taking into account line and charging losses -- to run electric vehicles than gasoline or diesel vehicles. For another, an EV only makes CO2 while the centralized power plant does. Switch the power plant -- a much easier proposition than changing all the cars yet again -- and instantly, all those EVs become less, or zero, polluters. Put a petrol powered vehicle on the road, it'll make pollutants until the day it is taken off the road permanently.
First, your facts are wrong, which is why you haven't caught on yet. Read a little more - or just ask questions, I'll help -- and you'll see. Second, while some of the electricity comes from coal, the thing is, if you have a petrol burning vehicle, it will *always* make CO2 and other pollutants. If you have an electric vehicle, and let's say it's fed by a coal plant, then the polluting, radiation-emitting coal plant can be replaced with something else and instantly, all those electric vehicles now change how they contribute to pollutants in a very desirable fashion. This is why it makes sense to convert to electric no matter *what* kind of plant your region is actually using (and it's rarely simple as "we're on coal", as power is shared and bought back and forth all the time.)
Yes, the uninformed and statistically unskilled are unnecessarily scared of nuclear. That is one of our more serious problems. Very hard to fix with the hysteria that is extant. If they understood that coal plants put out more radiation than nuclear plants do, and coal mines kill more people than nuclear plant accidents do, and coal mining does more environmental damage than uranium mining (not to mention thorium-based designs), and that today's nuclear designs are not those used at Chernobyl, and that the placing nuclear power plants on earthquake prone spots (like Japan) where Tsunamis can get at them (like Japan) are not good design practices, not to mention a few other basic, but important ideas... they might straighten out. Getting that info to them in a form they can understand... very tough. Plus, there are people who just love a fuckarow; they love to scream about things that make other people's eyes go wide, and giving up a prized preconception like "nuclear is bad and scary" is hard for some.
Solar can be stored. There is pumped storage at numerous scales (pumped storage can store any type of energy, not just solar, btw, as can most storage techniques), molten salt, flywheels, and even batteries (though the latter... ugh.) There's even a plan for using the anticipated at-home EV charging stations as distributed storage - load 'em up with any excess, feed back to the grid when convenient. Me, I'm a huge fan of pumped storage. Environmentally
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. It means it uses less than 1/3rd the power. First, it's way more efficient. So for the same miles traveled, the EV uses less power, period. What that 1/3 range means is that batteries don't store as much energy per cubic foot as gasoline or diesel fuel does, that's all. And that is probably about to change anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sigh. There is no "poison gas cloud." For crying out loud. This is just the kind of sensationalist nonsense that gets people stirred up about nothing.
Lots of CO2 means happy plants. Lots of happy plants means lots of O. CO2 increases in the atmosphere lead to a LITTLE bit of increased heat retention, which, mind you, is limited in how far it can go -- it's not an infinite curve you can extrapolate into biosphere extinction. It takes a LOT more CO2 to increase a LITTLE bit of IR-caused heat storage. Which leads to faster evap/precip cycles, which cools things better. ALl this happening over perhaps a couple centuries, during which we will no doubt move away from gasoline and diesel for several reasons. It's a money farm and a distraction. No more than that. Climate does change. Get over it. It always has. It always will.
"Poison gas cloud." For crying out loud.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nonsense. It's patently evident on ice core graphs. You have no idea what you're talking about.
No. I'm just someone who is interested in the science. Look at the ice core data. CO2 increases *clearly* lag temperature increases. So you can call names all you want, but there are the facts, and there isn't a damned thing you can do about them except continue to LIE.
Yes, clearly. I'm ignoring the science. You bet. Idiot. You're just wasting everyone's time with your name calling and baiting. Piss off.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes -- here's the ice core data showing it.
Right. I said that: "obviously the plants making lots and lots [of CO2]" (they get it from the air and make O.)
Yes, I completely understand. However, I *also* understand that the previous climate is not evidence that can be used to support prediction of what will happen. This is new theory, without prior evidence in the form of similar events to back it up... so we're in the unenviable place of having ONLY models to look at in order to shore up these ideas, and the problem is that so far -- the models don't work well. It's quite typical for mid-latitude predictions to be "on" but then the poles are way out of whack, or vice-versa, and consequently on average, the whole answer is wrong. And we can't test these models in ANY way by doing anything but letting them run, looking at the output, and then waiting on the climate. To put it in another form, we can only wait and see what the climate does in order to see if a model works, or not. This in turn means that we should reduce CO2 (which I also said: "yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions") as a preemptive measure simply because we know we're making more than is usually around, and we should be cautious of changes we make to our ecosphere, but there's zero indication about how fast and hard we really ought to go about that. This, combined with the fact that technology is at the very moment in the process of bringing us significant CO2 reductions, and oil too because of supply issues, puts me in a "do we really want to (further) injure our economy for known non-working models?" kind of outlook. I'm open to good science, but I'm not particularly open to speculation driven by broken models. I'm also pretty open to the idea of living in a more tropical world, which is also one of the potential outcomes here. By fighting this CO2 increase, we MIGHT be shooting ourselves right in the foot. We REALLY do not know. More work is called for, and I think that's happening, so I'm pretty happy, really.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Dear parent poster: get a name. This was worthy.
Who can tell if someone like me wrote the "OBVIOUS" retort above, or not? If I HAD written a lovely missive like that to my presumptive friend jd, I also would have posted AC. It's fun to have a Score 0 actually get read enough, be enjoyed, and get modded up. Getting even a Score 1 is a success. Thankfully, there are enough eye-rolling articles such as this on Slashdot that it's possible to actually have an AC success once in awhile.
Oddly enough, climate scientists are aware of this and it's not a concern.
The abortion is murder message isn't so bad but it needs to be accompanied by "here's how to prevent it" by someone with condoms in one hand, iud's in the other hand and in the gripping hand, the pill.
Lets stop abortion by stopping unwanted pregnancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There may have been some of that in the Working Group II (effects of global warming) and Working Group III (mitigation of global warming) reports but you'll find none of that in the Working Group I (the scientific basis of global warming) report. When the errors have been found they have been admitted and corrected. Do a few minor errors destroy the credibility of the whole report? That's like failing an exam because you missed 5 out of a thousand questions.
15 years since what? Certainly not 15 years of a cooling trend. You might be able to get one using the CRU data (the vilified Phil Jones' group) and cherry picking 1998 as your starting year but certainly not starting in 1996.
The Daily Fail? You're posting a link to the Daily Fail?
Watch out, that could cause cancer.
http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Prepare for 'weird' weather?
Yeah, thats right, the weather is gunna be really weird man.
I'm going to see it, and go 'wow, thats really wierd'. Thanks for helping me get that kind of description in my head. Now when I talk to my friends I'll be like, 'Hey, hows that weird weather, weird isn't it?'.
No.
It's going to be chaos, and death, year after year, getting worse and worse. If those in the media, the think-tanks and the governments, think for a second that the general population will continue to be herded with fluffy language, they are very wrong.
"There is no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records compiled at the University of East Anglia."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2011/07/15/why-hasnt-the-earth-warmed-in-nearly-15-years/
There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes. Projected precipitation and temperature changes imply possible changes in floods, although overall there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods. Confidence is low due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex, although there are exceptions to this statement.
To be sure, there are some paragraphs in which they have medium or high confidence of this or that, for instance more people are killed by natural disasters when they occur in poor countries. Well, smack my ass and call me a monkey, good thing the UN spent millions on a showy conference in Africa to tell us that. It was in Africa of course, because that's where they want the rich countries making all the CO2 to send trillions of dollars. That is the purpose of the UN (if most of the members were honest enough to tell you).
Opportunities exist to create synergies in international finance for disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change, but these have not yet been fully realized (high confidence)
You can see the report for yourself here: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/
Also, the desert has virtually no life in it compared to anywhere that is not volcanic rock. Even the open ocean has more life whether you measure by number or by volume, due to algae. You can see the life that is there, because there's nothing to hide it. But healthy topsoil can be over 50% living organic material, and it can be many feet deep where plants are permitted to grow up and then fall back down again for many years, e.g. in forests. Both the biomass and biodiversity in any desert deserving of the name would be a tiny blip if you put any healthy forest at the top of the chart.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If only. Never believe a battery breakthrough until they're shipping the product; breakthroughs X years away from commercialization are a dime a dozen.
The same place the "climategate" emails came from! How can you trust them?
When Climatologists can walk on water AND perfectly predict future weather patterns (a higher bar from predicting CHANGE) you will QUIT BEING AN ASSHOLE.
Excuse them for just trying to warn you. I suppose the Smoke Alarm in your house is also inaccurate because it can be confused by kitchen smoke -- might as well throw that out as well.
When the world is perfect, you will then be free to be responsible.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
We want all the global warming we can get as fast as we can get it to help reduce the massive human die off in the coming ice age. Yes the ice age will come, no we cannot warm the planet significantly with CO2 due to the fact we have plants everywhere which convert it back to oxygen. We will want to do even more like figuring out how to release massive amounts of methane and figure out how to lengthen its half life in the atmosphere beyond 7 years. Soon all of Canada and half of the US will be covered in a half mile thick sheet of ice and there will be water to grow crops that is not locked in ice. OR You can do absolutely nothing but waste your own time by lowering your carbon foot print? You decide.
YOU ARE CORRECT. Flamebait rating does not make sense. The IPCC is a corrupt group--just look at their leaked emails.
For a fun preview of what we're in for, check out the events of 1315-22.
Im intrigued. Did co2 cause this event as well?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/26/co2-ice-cores-vs-plant-stomata/
The short answer is no. There is some speculation about the causes, but it probably wasn't because of CO2 changes, and certainly nothing like the anthropogenic CO2 loading that we see today. It also wasn't a global phenomenon, but localized to northern Europe. Our data for global climate that far back is very unevenly distributed, though: we know the most about northern Europe, and much less about the rest of the world.
What has me encouraged here are the sheer number of people working on battery improvement that are showing promise in the lab (and the slow, but steady, increase of power capacity in the ultracap sector.) I honestly do think it's a given that we're about to make some significant jumps in battery capabilities.
I also keep in mind that because of patents, legal issues and lack of industrial capacity in the US, initial production cycles are stretching waaaay out. We're ok, we have several not-new vehicles, and are perfectly ready to buy EVs to replace them, but won't have to for probably ten years or perhaps even longer.
We need dependable range; I live 300 miles from the nearest city worthy of the name (and [barely] worthy of visiting.) My "buy now" criteria for the main family vehicle is to be able to make that trip in something built like an SUV, with all lights on, heater and audio system blasting, at an average speed of about 85 mph, without being at all concerned about running out of juice. And I want recharges that'll go as fast as the power supply allows. Although price isn't an issue for us, those are still very tough metrics. So in my case, patience is called for.
I'd also like to have a fun, blast-around muscle EV that is built to American size expectations (IOW, not a tiny little go-cart like the Tesla... pretty as it is, it's still about the size of an overfed mouse.) Once the critical components are available, might even build that one myself.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The concern comes when people try to point at the long term data and claim that this shows that CO2 causes heating. That's not been demonstrated. Also, on the page you link to, the claim that it causes additional heating at the lag time is not verified -- even hinted at -- by the heat curve, which doesn't change in character when CO2 begins to rise. The point was, and remains, that we can't look back for evidence of CO2-caused warming, because there are no such events shown in the historical data.
What we have right now is an idea unconfirmed by subsequent or prior events. The models don't work. This means we need more work on the models. As I said, we should probably cut back on CO2; the rationale for that is simply that we're making a lot more than usual, and we don't know what may happen as a result. We do know that in the past, CO2 has been high, as have temperatures (also low) in the normal course of events.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Heh, that's why I love that bit of trivia :)
More seriously, I think Reagan was informed on the subject by the Iron Lady, she was a trained chemist (Oxford) and was banging on about AWG way back in the 80's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
CO2 causing warming isn't based on history, it's based on physics and observation. We know that CO2 captures heat in the atmosphere. We can observe that it is, in fact, doing so. The upper atmosphere is cooling while the lower atmosphere is warming this is a classic fingerprint of CO2 based warming. Combining the known physics with historical proxies, we find that historically something triggers warming which then causes CO2 release. the CO2 becomes a feedback mechanism that continues the warming. So while CO2 lags the initial warming, it then drives the subsequent warming.
It's like you're arguing that second gear doesn't move a car forward because it always follows the movement caused by first gear, therefore second gear must actually slow the car down. The argument seems reasonable unless, of course, you actually understand what you're talking about.
Also, don't believe the hype, the models actually work very well.
They already are on the edge. And you want to allow them to go worse?!?!?!?
Even the researchers that had objected to global warming now acknowledges its happening.
You mean the researchers who claim they were skeptics but were really true believers for decades?
I think he means the ones that the self-described sceptics swore we real and true scientists and that they would accept their answer whatever it was, until, the "real and true scientists" came up with the wrong answer and suddenly became charlatans whom could never be trusted.
For example Anthony Watts said:
"And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren’t any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. If the project was terminated tomorrow, nobody loses jobs, no large government programs get shut down, and no dependent programs crash either. That lack of strings attached to funding, plus the broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we’ve seen yet. Dr. Fred Singer also gives a tentative endorsement of the methods."
and then said:
"Both [Fall et al. 2011 and Menne et al. 2010] (and cited by Muller et al) do an analysis over a thirty year time period while the Muller et al paper uses data for comparison from 1950 – 2010....I see this as a basic failure in understanding the limitations of the siting survey we conducted on the USHCN, rendering the Muller et al paper conclusions highly uncertain, if not erroneous....I consider the paper fatally flawed as it now stands, and thus I recommend it be removed from publication consideration by JGR until such time that it can be reworked....it appears they have circumvented the scientific process in favor of PR."
when they produced results that he didn't like. It seems to me that when real sceptics look at the real evidence they stop being sceptics and then the fake sceptics denounce them as traitors to the cause.
Poor Ronnie.
Is it cold in here to you?
Yes, the ice cores show that in coming out of a glaciation the temperature rise leads the CO2 rise. They also show that the temperature drop going into the next glaciation leads the drop in CO2. This shows that CO2 is a feedback of temperature change. But it does nothing to show that CO2 cannot be a forcing for temperature change as well. Show me the science that says if we increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere artificially that the infrared absorption properties of CO2 won't lead to an increase in temperature. The correlation between temperature changes and CO2 levels in no way proves that CO2 can't be a forcing factor as well.
www.namratasinha.com
Warming. Good grief. Well, maybe we'd better be a little more specific. Heat sequestration based on IR absorption is based on physics. So are insolation differentials based upon the presence of IR absorption zones. Those are rather simple ideas. However, generalizing them into "the globe will warm" is based on assumptions not backed by either experience (no such historical data) or models that work; because both the physics of, and the inputs to, of atmospheric circulation, temperature modulation, ocean absorption, moderating effects on that, biosphere activity, human activity, the evap/precip cycle, technological change, social change, and a hundred other things are unknown in detail sufficient to predict much of anything.
What we do know, and I mean actually for sure, is that we -- meaning humankind -- are putting out more CO2 than ever before, and so we'd probably better back off in case that does nudge the ecosystem into instability one way or another. But that's about it.
And no, dude, the models suck horse's ass. The temperatures today are NOT what they were predicted to be; the last ten years do NOT show warming; the seas have NOT risen as predicted; extreme weather has NOT come to pass as predicted; and so on. If you -- anyone -- makes a climate model that works, it'll predict the bloody climate, and events will match the predictions. They don't do that. Ergo: The. Models. Don't. Work.
Just as you can't get a weather prediction that goes out more than a few days by sampling data that is missing many significant inputs, you can't get a climate prediction that goes out any worthy distance by sampling data that is missing many significant inputs. And statistics are both incredibly tricky and widely misunderstood; they're the wrong place to turn when your models are shitty in the first place, which is definitely the case here. That's also why on the very page you point to, the climate prediction wanders all around what actually happens, but never actually manages to predict the climate.
What you call a model that "actually works very well" is shown on that very page to be predicting huge rises where instead, the climate takes a huge fall, and so on... happens all along the graph. This is a strong indicator of a model that is correcting itself with the data in hand at the target point; not a model that is actually predicting. If the model *worked*, all it would need as input would be the weather data from 1850, and it would provide you with the climate results from then until today, with no more input than changes in man-made effects, which are otherwise unpredictable -- and that's part of the reason why projecting any curve into the future is an exercise in futility. We don't -- in fact, can't -- know what tomorrow will bring in terms of human action and technology. Predicting the future in a system like that is impossible.
I assure you, we'd know it if we had climate models that work. Just the way we'd know it if we had weather models that worked. So far, we have neither.
And no, I'm not saying weather == climate. Don't even go there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Right Wing = Republican in the USA.
Left Wing = Democrats in USA. Although they are a center right party in the US compared to socialists in Europe.