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Climate Change To Drive Weather Disasters, Say UN Experts
mdsolar writes "Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday. In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather. And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said."
When they say "climate change" it's code for "bullshit excuse for more regulations, taxes, and you feeling guilty for being Homo sapiens sapiens."
Can we take the political clout away from the self-haters yet?
Isn't "UN Experts" an oxymoron?
Can't wait for all the AC right-winger and libertarians to pile in -- who will rail against the science because they disagree with the policy implications of climate change.
Funny how the Right love science when it produces weapons to bomb brown people, or enriches multinational corporations. But go NUTS if it means that their rich friends endure more regulation.
There is 7 BILLION people on this planet, and nearly 1/3 of the forest has been cut down in the last century. With all the polution humans cause, and millions roads that we built, how can anyone dispute our involvement in climate change?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Climate scientists sprout when it's getting warmer, so it's not only gloom&doom.
commyanist faget's wants to take my hummor and make me eat vegitabel's! WAAAGH!
You can find studies that show more hurricanes, less hurricanes, more sever hurricanes all due to global warming. It's getting old attributing every possible outcome to Advance Global Warming. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html http://www.science20.com/news/global_warming_may_mean_fewer_hurricanes http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0109-global_warming_causes_severe_storms.htm
It all starts at 0
Ok, so.. Less hurricanes, but about a 50% chance wind speed might increase (by how much? 1mph? 2? 30? 5000000?)
I just hate how they take the conclusion "the same number of hurricanes, or less" and yet still spin it into a scary prediction, by leading it with a "the wind might blow harder". I guess that truth needed a little bit of PR work to make it convenient.
It also predicts larger economic damages due to weather. Well, no duh. We're building more and more expensive stuff. The weather could stay the same and this will be true.
Missing is any mention of anthropogenic CC, CO2, or anything like that. So yeah, it's pretty safe to predict the climate will change with 100% confidence, if you don't tag it with that.
... blueprints for a sustainable underground city as functional as a surface city!
And while I am at it, Bond villain lairs for all the rich types.
Actually, screw it, where is the space cannon? Earth is screwed.
I'm moving to Mars. I hear the local population are quite nice.
Isn't that the prize Boo Boo won for doing basically nothing at all?
'nuff said
They've been perpetuating disasters since 1945!
You can find studies that show more hurricanes, less hurricanes, more sever hurricanes all due to global warming. It's getting old attributing every possible outcome to Advance Global Warming. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html http://www.science20.com/news/global_warming_may_mean_fewer_hurricanes http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0109-global_warming_causes_severe_storms.htm
You do realize that a hurricane and a "severe storm" are rather different things, right? Your last Science Daily citation is about severe storms, not hurricanes. It never even uses the word "hurricane" nor does it indicate that it's talking about storms that only affect coastlines. A thunderstorm and a hurricane are two very different events. Are you going to complain that global warming reports are in direct conflict over precipitation figures and then link to stories about increased monsoon seasons and decreased snow fall?
There is now consensus that it sucks to be poor, to live on small island states and arid regions.
Some change should become take place when richer countries start getting hit more regularly.
More doom and gloom. Doom and Gloom.
There will always be climate change. The problem being, each agency seems to have its own criteria for determining what constitutes an issue, what contributes to the issue, and what examples there exist of the problem.
Sorry, but I come to realize anything coming out of the UN requires increased scrutiny. Just look at the wording, they refuse still to be locked down. They have learned their lesson after the fear mongering following spectacular events like Katrina. Words like "likely", "hard to gauge", "extreme", and more.
Its a FUD festival.
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before. We certainly cannot know the types of rain storms across major portions of this world much over a hundred years ago, let alone hurricane/typhoon frequency simply because no had the ability to find them all.
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If and when the next natural disaster happens, how will we know if it is spawned by climate change, or if it is something that would have happened anyway? How do meteorologists make that determination? I seriously would like to know.
I completely believe the data that these scientists have collected. I also believe that they have done their work right. I believe in their findings and their predictions about how the climate will be changing in the coming years.
What I don't believe is why they thing this change his happening. The climate of our planet is pretty complicated, and I know I don't understand or all the variables involved. I'm sure the guys that worked on this study have a good understanding of it, but we only have data for maybe a few hundred years if we're lucky? The earth has been around a long time and I'd expected it would go through changes as it goes through its very long life.
My other issue with climate study is that it's used as a political weapon. Politicians wield the results to push their own agendas. With this, it seems like results from studies could be skewed.
Its not what it is, its something else.
We've seen the things blamed on "Climate Change" shift from hotter temperatures, to *cooler temperatures* (as things cooled or didn't warm very much the last decade) to animals doing weird stuff we don't think they would normally do, etc., etc.
Next, weather disasters -- which have been a constant on this planet forever will now be blamed on climate change.
And guaranteed if there aren't as many weather disasters (since those are driven by an extremely complex system of which we only understand a tiny bit about) as there "should be" the depression of weather disasters will be blamed on climate change as well.
(Actually this happens with their yearly hurricane season predictions already).
The good part is that people are really wising up to this stuff. The bad part is the alarmists are still getting money.
At least, that's what the right-wingers are gonna say when their home states get inundated by successive and increasingly bad tornado seasons.
The folks behind some enormous word-wide climate rallies, 350.org, just launched a campaign to connect the dots between weather anomalies and climate: http://www.climatedots.org/
th3 reaper BSD's
...like to get that first jab in.
Funny, also, how the same left wingers, when somebody says, yeah, there is climate change, jump right in, and say "and you know it's man-made, right?
No, we don't know it's man-made. We do not have enough data.
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
It's a 594 page report with 220 authors from 62 nations leaving 18,611 review comments published by the United Nations. And that's what your professional assessment of this effort? Great press? Extortion?
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before.
So I have two things here, I have a six hundred page report with many many many citations from peer reviewed journals. And I have your two or three sentences of cheap rhetoric -- you don't live on the coasts so you say "depends on where you are and what change you experience." And we should just all turtle inwards and say "fuck commerce and 90% of the world population"? You say that we know it's been hotter than before yet you don't explain how the temperature slowly got to that point, slower than a hundred years, slow enough for it not to totally destroy a key link in the food chain. Nobody's depending on polar bears, but what happens when the fisheries in the ocean start coming up drastically short or we get another dust bowl? This report, it's not worried about Earth, animals, plants, etc. It's worried about humans. We depend on those other things but the reason to worry is not FUD and your idiotic assertions aren't doing anything to calm anybody. So please shut the hell up until you have something meaningful to contribute.
My work here is dung.
Extreme weather goes in cycles, usually a rough multiple of solar cycle. this was taught in universities decades ago because it is true. what we have is urban sprawl and overdevelopment putting more real estate and people in harms way from weather (and earthquakes too). As for these "island natives threatened by rising seas", the sea has been rising since the last ice age, these lands that are essentially at sea level or an inch above are doomed anyway, whether now or in the next couple hundred years, they might as well move now because their population will only grow with modern benefits. Those half a century old and older see the patterns, while the young think they are living in some new era.
Tough luck; politicians in the largest superpower, which is neither a small island, poor nor arid, have determined through extensive consulting of industry lobbyists and religious leaders that global warming does not exist.
By the year 2005, young children won't even know what snow is. (It's funny how all these dire warnings from the UN and other nation-level climate bureaus never seem to come true. - ed.) BTW the rate-of-rise of sealevel on these island nations is only two-thousandths of an inch per year. Hardly a great tragedy.
LINK Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
LINK # 2 http://www.uncommondescent.com/science/no-more-snow-in-england-say-global-warmists/
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm still pretty skeptical about AGW (though not global warming itself, the temperature records unquestionably and unsurprisingly show a warming trend).
But here's the thing: it doesn't fucking matter.
We are spewing toxins into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Air advisories are more common by the year and I can barely stand being in big cities for an hour before the saturated odor of pollution gets to me (no not physically, I'm not a whiner about such things... it just... gets to me... I want away from it).
So why the fuck are we even discussing this in light of what might possibly happen if the data isn't as bogus as it seems at times and the models that have never been right might possibly be right this time?
All of the same things that allegedly contribute to AGW are polluting the air and water in real, tangible, short term ways. How about we focus on that right now and keep an eye on the still unanswered question of exactly what it means to the climate.
Do you just keep pulling these numbers out of your ass?
Surface area, water: 361,132,000 km2[0]
Surface area, water, in acres: 89,000,000,000[1]
People on earth: ~7,000,000,000
Surface area (water, acres) divided by people: 89,000,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 ~= 13.
13. Thirteen. Not 1285. You're off by a factor of 100 this time!
Btw, not saying that "water surface area" has any relevance whatsoever in this case (it may or may not, I would have guessed volume mattered more than area, but I don't know) - but please, for the love of FSM, stop making numbers up just to use them in your arguments.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=361%2C132%2C000+km2+in+acres
May we live long and die out
So if it gets hotter, it's global warming. If it get's colder, it's global warming.
It shocks me when people equate more snow with "being colder." You do realize that it can snow at a very wide range of temperatures, right? "Snowing harder" means an increase in precipitation, not a decrease of temperatures.
We just have to pay Al Gore his copy right claim for inventing global warming and it will all go away.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Complete Bullshit.....everything the political org IPCC says is BS
the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
That is impressive. Toot-Toot
"Climate" and "climate change" have at their very heart by definition, the perception i.e. psychological state of the human who is preceiving said "climate" and "climage change".
Therefore the psychological state of the UN experts appears to be one of psychosis related to hysteria and unreasonable fear.
Come on, guys, this is Slashdot. In 100 years or so I won't care about the state that the planet was in because I'm an upload that doesn't live on it anymore, and in any case, plans are underway to disassemble it completely for raw materials.
Besides, who wants to drag around an ENTIRE PLANET when the simulations are so much better? It's the same reason we have iPods in our pockets instead of a forklift full of 78s following us around wherever we go.
From the IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events and Disasters:
FAQ 3.1 Is the Climate Becoming More Extreme? [...]None of the above instruments has yet been developed sufficiently as to allow us to confidently answer the question posed here. Thus we are restricted to questions about whether specific extremes are becoming more or less common, and our confidence in the answers to such questions, including the direction and magnitude of changes in specific extremes, depends on the type of extreme, as well as on the region and season, linked with the level of understanding of the underlying processes and the reliability of their simulation in models.
[quote]threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions[/quote] So what, has mother nature turned greedy? "Mommy only loves you if your GDP is soooooo big".
However, people saying that the storm cares if the GDP is so much just gives these guys [Climate Change Deniers] more credit...
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
Sounds like the Christian End of Times to me. Great, now we've got a bunch of Christian scientists. Who are we going to make fun of now?
Europe lost maybe 20 million people or more to the effects of a multi-decade cooling due to lack of sunspots starting in the time of Galileo who discovered the spots. Snow and ice in summer and ruined crops & created massive starvation.
Until you can accurately predictall the phases of the Sun's output, you are not going to be able to predict long term climate effects. We know the earth has a MASSIVE ice age cycle that occurs every 110,000 years or so due to cyclical orbit changes around the sun. We know for sure that Canada, northern US & Europe and Siberia will again be icebound at some point.
Come up with the predictive models that can show when all the orbit and sun variations actually have occurred and then when they will occur again and we will truly have a basis to judge what is going on.
Right now, all this "climate change" discussion is political to support a particular deindustrialization agenda, as if that will overcome the changes in the Sun which DWARF everything else. The Sun will always rule everything...to the bitter end of life on Earth as a cinder.
"The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21534-oceans-acidifying-at-unprecedented-speed.html
A key point (indirectly pointed to in the article) is that the *rate of change* of acidity is what's critical. We've got the accelerator floored and we're close to the cliff.
After all, being a recent escapee from the US of A, to dear olde England, I'd have to say the average Londoner looks close to starvation compared to the average Californian. Mind you,there is a chance that that's down to people actually walking places as opposed to getting in a car to travel a 1/3 of a mile.
Maybe you aren't aware of them, or perhaps choose not to be aware of them. Then there's Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley, Kevin Trenberth (Mr Katrina is just the start). Other than that, last I noted, the consensus(?) is that warming can no longer be stopped, although I think that's more of an IPCC thing.
Anyhow, stop being such a tosser and come back to the real world, it's nice and warm here.
Surveys show that the public believes in AGW and wants the government to do something. However the public is against taxing gas and electricity and is in favor of offering tax breaks to produce clean energy and encourage clean products. I see that as us wanting change without the pain.
Does anyone think that maybe the fact that there are 7 times as many people in the world today than there was only 200 years ago could be a contributor to global warming? 7 billion people breathing out carbon dioxide...
Considering that none of the IPCC's predictions -- not a single one -- has come even close to reality since their first Assessment Report back in the 90s, I very much doubt the label "experts" is appropriate.
Once again we get a report that gives sensational headlines and no substance. I have seen these continuously for the last 30 years.
Get back to us when one of these predictions actually comes true. So far they are 0 for about 30 tries. First we were all going to freeze to death in 20 years, then we were all going to cook to death in 20 years. Now it's not 20 years, it's 100, or 200, or 300. How is this any better than rank superstition?
We need Science, not politics. Both sides in this debate don't know what they are talking about!
get back to me when Climate Science is more than just random guesses.
All you have to do is answer one question to figure it out...
'How has the temperature changed over the last 20 years for every planet in our solar system?'
We've moved the start of tornado season to January.
Enjoy, red states!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
global warming is a hoax that is used by communists to gain control of world governments. slashdot is their lapdog.
People who are truly experts in a field do not work at the UN. They work in their field as actual scientists/engineers/whatever.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
"A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
"There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change"
"The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados"
"The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.""
How do we get from "their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research" to "climate change to drive weather disasters"?
Really?
I quite like extreme weather. Mild weather is boring. I just hope we actually get to see some during my lifetime instead of 10,000 years from now.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Conservatives have argued that if there's even a one percent chance of a nation attacking us, we should start a war.
The conservative approach to climate change would be to proceed on the basis that if there's even a one percent chance that the people who spend their lives studying climate know what they're talking about, then we should reforest, build more nuclear power plants, and generally do things that are good ideas anyway.
See ya'll at the re-education camps!
http://uonews.uoregon.edu/archive/news-release/2012/3/simultaneous-action-needed-break-cultural-inertia-climate-change-respons
Really, you AGW people aren't going to be happy until there's shooting. news for ya...you are pussies and don't know how to shoot.
On another post, the very warm temps seen in March were reported and a discussion followed that. What people appear to have forgotten is that for most of America, excluding the Pacific Northwest, the winter season was very mild. What happened in the PNW, was winter, you know, snow, ice, rain, wind, bitter cold. That is normal yet the rest of America did not see this. Why? And why were the temps in March itself so high, except in the PNW, when the planet is tilted away from the sun?
So all weather events are due to climate change. What a bunch of fraudsters. Look a warmer world is a wetter world, a colder world is a drier desertified world. Yes the UN has shown themselves to be incompetent. So 600+ pages and 220 authors. Let's see what the details are. Maybe like previous UN reports from the IPCC we will find blatant errors and misrepresentations forming it.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
All the whys aside, global temperatures are rising. Higher temperatures directly correlate with increased evaporation rates. Increased evaporation rates result in increased volumes of water vapor in the atmosphere. The latent heat energy in the water vapor means more available energy in the atmosphere. Why would anyone be surprised by larger releases of this energy in weather events, its not like it is going to be destroyed you know. wabi-sabi matthew
It seems that too many people mistake local, short-term climate effects for global, long-term change. We know from our sketchy histories of Northern European people that climate has swung rather rapidly and far from cool to warm and back again in the past. The changes are centuries long and at any moment seem like the new reality to current inhabitants. These oscillations appear to be part of life on earth.
The folks who spew all of their drek about CO2 levels don't seem to realize that ice cores show that we are currently way below levels from the past. Yes, CO2 levels are involved in oscillations, too!
Perhaps we should simply plant more trees (they live off of the CO2!) and be good stewards of what we have.
You will observe that the driving factor behind all of the histrionics is the love of money. All of this research, which we MUST do to save our planet, is costly. Therefore, fork over lots more money and let the scientists work their magic. Of course, the scientists who get the money are the ones we TRUST to be honest! Like the folks at The University of East Anglia? Or the ones who told us the glaciers will al be gone from the Himalayas in a few years?
TRUTH: Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Go ahead and look at the figures, but be careful with the liars.
People involved in promoting the radical and impoverishing lifestyle changes with fixing global warming seem to be wealthier, elitist or foolish types with their eyes fixed far more on the future than now. The very fact of the matter is that for most people, caring about the earth is actually pretty stupid. It makes your energy prices higher - because solar and other supposed green technologies are simply more expensive, or they would be being sold, it makes food prices higher, and it means you have less stuff. That translates into increased poverty. So, to save the planet, in your eyes, you are talking about screwing the human race today.
And, let's not forget one most important part of science that the greens leave out of the debate.
1) If climate change were as dramatically terrible as they say, why should we wait for solar and wind to come online, when we could, even in our present bankrupt state, nationally afford a rollout of nuclear power and completely replace all of our fossil electrical generating stations in the USA for under 2 trillion dollars and be done with it in a decade?
2) Even if we did point 1, and did so worldwide, it would still take 800 years or so for CO2 levels to fall to pre-industrial levels.
So it is not that people are being deniers per say, they just deny it partially because they think what the greenies are saying makes no sense. It's not so dangerous that the obvious answer is the one we should take, being poorer (with pre-industrial per capita energy consumption), would really suck, and for all of that, its not going to make a difference anyway within our lifetimes. It's like, the greens are saying, let's just be poor without actually doing the real thing (nuclear), to solve the problem, and then not really solve it anyway.
Whose really being scientific here?
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2772023&cid=39607863