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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?
The same way a certain kind of person disputes any other fact that has implications they don't like.
Or that their leaders don't like, and tell them that they shouldn't like either.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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!
I agree, but to play devil's advocate i would reply:
in pretty much the same way people can actually defend creationism vs evolution. in spite of all the scientifical artifacts, findings and proofs pointing toward one direction.
men will find deeply defend what they think must be true, despite all evidences.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
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'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'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.
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.)
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, 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.
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.