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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."
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.
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
You read 596 pages already?
more regulations, taxes
Think of the billionaires' children!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I am socially and fiscally conservative. I believe in states' rights. The data about what exactly is happening to our climate is muddy. The outcomes are unknown. There is a lot of politics behind it.
But what we are doing to the environment cannot be good. We need to do something about it. Add a $5/gal tax to gasoline and use the money to develop public transporation and bicycling infrastructure. Bar new fossil fuel plants. Build offshore wind farms, the Kennedys be damed. Add tarrifs to good from countries that are not cutting emissions. Invest in next-generation nuclear reactor development. Ban cars from city centers. Stop giving tax rebates to people buying hybrids - give tax rebates to people buying bicycles, train tickets, and bus tickets. Stop building cities around cars.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Too late. They pounced while your weren't looking, and got FP to boot. Idiots... They're the first one to dismiss "global warming" when it snows hard in their town, while totally missing the real story - it's snowing harder because of global warming. Extremes in weather are the predictable outcome of more energy in the environment. To be sure, one storm, does not a trend make, but the observed events are pretty much following the model. "Damn those scientists! Let's just cover our eyes and ears and mutter to ourselves..."
That's like an obese person who eats junk food all day, and says his diabetes has nothing to do with his diet!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Is there consensus on that second part? What is your source? Because that is not what is said on the first page of the report the IPCC just released.
You are playing fast-and-loose with the words "all" and "fact", which seems to be the standard mode of operation for left-wing nutjobs. The facts are: 1. We have a lot of evidence suggesting that climate change is happening. 2. We have some evidence that human pollution has caused some of the symptoms of climate change. 3. We also know for a fact that the overall climate of the earth has changed and fluctuated to extremes without the help of humans, in FACT, before humans even existed.
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
it's a theory
You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think^W suppose it means.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Uhhh, yeah, they are. If a theory is non-falsifiable, it isn't science. Evolution is highly falsifiable. AGW isn't. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The change is so small that it falls within the noise of natural variability of both weather (fluctuations in water vapor content have hundreds of times as much effect on atmospheric heat retention as all the CO2 ever produced by man), and climate (we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes). We don't even have a single control (whereas we have practiaclly unlimited controls and unlimited samples to show that evolution happens, and the ability to read paste changes in the genetic code, which are predictive, etc etc).
Also, ad hominem is a logical fallacy. If you want to find the actual truth, rather than descending into political squabbling, you would do well to avoid it.
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".
Use your common sense. Hurricanes are routine events. We have them every single year, and the majority don't cause much damage. It's the most extreme hurricanes that cause damage, so it's the frequency of those extreme hurricanes that matters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. You really got screwed over by your school system. This isn't pseudoscience, this is the real deal. And just because you seem to not understand the words the scientific community uses to describe the validity of a hypothesis and the evidence supporting it doesn't make it any less real.
That's like an obese person who eats junk food all day, and says his diabetes has nothing to do with his diet!
But you can't prove that it's the diet that is causing the diabetes. Might as well be lack of excercise, or too much wanking, or whatever. Correlation != causation and so on.
That said, if I was fat and started to develop a type 2 diabetes, I would fix my diet, just in case.
I'm pretty sure no one thinks the idea of pumping shit-tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a GOOD thing. It's not a question of whether we should do something about this, it's a question of how to most rationally balance our economic interests and our long-term environmental interests. The problem is that reason has become a scarce commodity in both sides of the debate at this point. The increasingly shrill alarmism of the left and the head-in-the-sand denialism of the right are making for the kind of emotionally-charged debate that's making it damn near impossible to chart a clear path that's going to keep the planet from warming too much while also not creating an economic disaster worse than the environmental one.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Huh, IPWC.... I'm looking at the IPCC report this slashdot article is about, right now. It does not sound anything like "consensus". It sounds like properly nuanced presentation of their analysis. This is not what you will read in the news:
There is evidence that some extremes have changed as a result of anthropogenic influences, including
increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It is likely that anthropogenic influences have led
to warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures at the global scale. There is medium confidence
that anthropogenic influences have contributed to intensification of extreme precipitation at the global scale. It is
likely that there has been an anthropogenic influence on increasing extreme coastal high water due to an increase in
mean sea level. The uncertainties in the historical tropical cyclone records, the incomplete understanding of the physical
mechanisms linking tropical cyclone metrics to climate change, and the degree of tropical cyclone variability provide
only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic
influences. Attribution of single extreme events to anthropogenic climate change is challenging.
Don't waste any effort having a conversation with AC and his/her ilk. They won't believe anything that is in conflict with their world view. Their motto must be ignorance is bliss!
I'm having trouble telling you two apart.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Or, in plain english: "Climate is changing, we screwed it up, now we're going to get more flooding. Not sure about the cyclones though."
Do you know what "likely" refers to when used by the IPCC? What about "medium confidence", etc? If not, are you qualified to interpret their statements? Please at least skim the report that millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have produced for you. First, go to page 21.
I listen to it, for the sole reason that I do not have an exit plan for when this planet becomes uninhabitable. I cannot shrug, say "oh well, looks like it failed" and head over for my other Earth and start over there.
In risk management, we'd handle it as a high risk, regardless of the probability. The impact is devastating, the probability nonzero, resulting in a risk you have to take serious and handle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No one respectable is saying climate change will ruin the earth, or even wipe out humanity... Please stop with this falsehood. When you set cost to EXTREME MAXIMUM it makes cost-benefit analysis impossible for you to perform.
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.
and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable
It occurs that weather patterns on earth have not been that predictable, ever.... prediction of weather is inherently hard. Scientists have done a good job explaining away weather phenomena in the past, such as ice ages. But the state of the art has never been any good at predicting changes in weather patterns like that.
I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of this from a risk management position.
The naysayers basically seem to be stating that the science must be absolutely ironclad before we settle on any course of action, other than what we're doing today.
If they're wrong, and if climate change is real, then we're all in a whole big pile of hurt. I won't say that the Earth will become uninhabitable, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that the Earth won't sustain the current population or society. It'll be more than bad enough.
If they're right, and climage change isn't happening, then they're out some profitability.
The question is how much remediation we do, how much we cut back, how much we push conservation, and how much we push alternative energy. For the first measure, to fail to push conservation in many forms is absolutely criminal, because it's good, no matter what. Better-insulated houses are just plain better, and will require less fuel, of whatever form. Same thing for higher-mileage cars, obviously balancing for safety. Sometimes I think in America the use of fossil fuel is considered a right, almost a duty - when if it were more properly considered an expense we'd be taking different actions.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
There are even worse examples than that. "Silent Spring" caused huge reduction in the use of DDT as a pesticide, as it reported environmental consequences along with some studies linking it to cancer. Of those studies, one had design errors and the others people haven't been able to reproduce. Meanwhile, the reduced use of DDT in Africa and South America caused a huge increase in deaths from malaria, projected to be in the tens of thousands. Countries where malaria is a problem are now starting to use DDT again, and are seing malaria infection rates drop dramatically. Meanwhile, Americans are happy because the population of their national bird has increased.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Uhhh, yeah, they are. If a theory is non-falsifiable, it isn't science. Evolution is highly falsifiable. AGW isn't. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The change is so small that it falls within the noise of natural variability of both weather (fluctuations in water vapor content have hundreds of times as much effect on atmospheric heat retention as all the CO2 ever produced by man), and climate (we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes). We don't even have a single control (whereas we have practiaclly unlimited controls and unlimited samples to show that evolution happens, and the ability to read paste changes in the genetic code, which are predictive, etc etc).
Ways anthropogenic global warming can be falsified:
1) Extended period of stable or declining temperatures, while atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase. (And no that doesn't mean you can disprove global warming by comparing a downward fluctuating year and an upward fluctuating year in the past.)
2) Average daytime temperatures increasing more than nighttime temperatures. (One of the signatures of the greenhouse effect versus solar driven temperature change is that nighttime temperatures increase more than daytime)
3) Equatorial temperatures increasing more than polar temperatures. (One of the signatures of the greenhouse effect versus solar driven temperature change is that temperatures in the polar regions increase faster than the equator)
4) Upper atmosphere temperatures increasing instead of decreasing. (Yes, another way to differentiate between the greenhouse effect and solar temperature driven changes.)
I'll leave out the highly improbable ones (like a declining level of CO2 in the atmosphere with an continuing to increase temperature or the disproof of most of modern physics which would be required to actually call the underlying physical model into question.)
Your idea sounds good. Any ideas on what you're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from your changes?
The scientific community also suppressed evidence of Lamarckian-looking evolution because it didn't fit the consensus view that Darwinian theories were the answer. And now what do we find? OOPS! Consensus was wrong, for something like 150 years, and there is plenty of evidence showing that Lamarck was on to something. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he was right - ACQUIRED TRAITS CAN BE INHERITED. The scientific community can be wrong, and shouting down dissenting views isn't good science. There's a lot more to the world than "scientific consensus" can understand.
No one except you thinks the planet will become uninhabitable. Please stop repeating this.
If that's true, there needs to be more competition in the insurance industry. What is stopping them from raising premiums for any reason whatsoever?
I knew that the denial crowd would leap for this. Everything has to be interpreted as a conspiracy, or people lying, or being dishonest, or evil, or stupid. Anything but accept that intelligent people are trying to tell you something.
/counter-evidence/, like a good skeptic actually would.
Well, the actuaries in the insurance industry have done the math, and worked out that they need to raise premiums to deal with the already measurable risk. You can dismiss this out of hand if you like, but you'll still have to pay. Instead, you could, of course, extend yourself by learning something about he issue. And that means you should stop reading partisan blogs, and find
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
No, no, no. We'd immediately implement an exemption for people making less than 800% of the poverty level and pass an income tax credit for almost all of the rest. Thankfully the tax prep industry is tightly coupled with Washington, so you know the next version of TaxCut or TurboTax will take this into consideration.
We'll need to implement a National ID you will be required to present at the gas station so it can link to a central database to approve each purchase. We'll contract that out to private industry who will, of course, need to take just a small percentage of the transaction to cover their expenses. No point in having state issued ID's anymore so we'll just ban them.
Naturally we'll need a lot of new laws and regulations to implement this new tax. Because $5/gal tax is going to inspire a bunch of black market activity we'll have to establish a new Department of Energy Security (DES) . The DES will have to have extreme police powers to conduct their newly established war on un-taxed gas smugglers which will include para-military forces making no-knock raids on private residences. For the children; y'know.
In the end, we'll have a massive new Federal bureaucracy with a well established constituency of special interests. They'll, of course, be hiring a lot of lobbyists and every time the budget comes up for renewal we'll have a parade of our 'elected' officials telling us we can't possibly cut funding (read: give smaller increases) to the new bureaucracy or some unspecified "THEY" will win.
Since we're excluding almost everyone from the tax and we've got a new bureaucracy to pay for, it turns out we're not getting quite as much revenue as we'd like and the only option at that point will be to nationalize the entire petrochemical industry. Don't worry though, we'll pay for it all by raising the gas tax and cutting waste and fraud.
If you live in the US, you are already benefiting from redistribution of wealth toward drivers. Current gas taxes do not come anywhere close to covering road costs. You are being subsidized by people like me who pay income and property taxes to support the roads but then bike to work. I am proposing letting you pay out of your own wages.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Well, I don't know about suppressed. As far as I know, the evidence for lamarckian inheritance wasn't strong enough for most researchers to accept it without a plausible mechanism. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah, when I'm looking for a careful assessment of scientifice evidence, my first source is always uncommondescent.com (actual byline: "serving the intelligent design community").
As for your first link, it quotes one actual climate scientist saying that in the future, snowfalls in parts of England are going to be rare and exciting (the "in a few years" is from the journalist, not the scientist). Apparently you regard this statement as absolutely ridiculous on its face?
Well, global warming is expected to warm global temperatures by 2degC or more by 2100. More so on land (as compared to oceans) and more so in the Northern hemisphere. Now let's compare the average minimum winter temperatures of two cities:
London, UK: 2.7 (Dec), 2.3 (Jan) 2.1 (Feb).
Marseille, France: 4.1 (Dec), 3.0 (Jan), 3.9 (Feb).
Guess what? Snowfalls are rare and exciting events in Marseille, right now! What do you think will happen in London when daily temperatures increase by two degrees?
Ok, and who has said that an anoxic event is likely to occur? I'm not being snarky, it is an honest question.
The actuaries have the same data available to us... honestly I have no idea why actuaries are suddenly an authority on climate science but whatever.
There is no scam necessary. If the insurance company can make more money by justifying higher premiums (for any reason), they should be expected to do so up to the point it loses them business.
Really, this is a very convoluted argument with regards to AGW. It unnecessarily adds all sorts of business, regulatory, and social factors. It makes much more sense to simply look at what the IPCC has said and discuss that.
According to wikipedia the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a 6 degree rise over 20,000 years. That's a lot of time to adapt. Compare that to the rate of change happening now. See the difference?