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Draft of IPCC 2013 Report Already Circulating
First time accepted submitter iggymanz writes "More precise modeling has changed some long term climate predictions: sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century, but past dire warnings of stronger storms or more frequent droughts won't pan out. Instead there will be less strong storms, but peak winds in the tropics might be slightly higher. Temperature rise of global average will be about 3 degree C total, including the 1 degree C rise over the 20th century. In places where precipitation is frequent, it will become even more frequent; in arid areas, the tendency will be to become even drier. Some new arid areas are expected to appear in the south of N. America, South Africa and Mediterranean countries. Overall, hardly a doomsday scenario."
Because the scum of the Earth doesn't mind ignoring facts while siphoning money from the stupid?
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No, it was partly to justify wealth transfer from first world to the richest individuals, through a third world proxy ruled by corrupt officials. It's obvious now that the Kioto Protocol has failed, the UN has created a new excuse to perform the same operation (now, instead of buying them "carbon credits", rich countries will have to give them "compensation money for climate change")
The rest was to justify the move to alternate (worse) forms of energy, because it's expected China and India will increase the cost of oil now that they are starting to abandon the socialist-based economies that put them into starving misery for decades. USA, Japan and Europe won't have it as easy now that they have to compete with these awakening giants for energy production.
Just sit back and chill !! You can't do anything about it !! NO !! You CAN'T !!
Sure you can. Move. Its not that hard, depending where you live. I live near a great lake, the supposed increase in extremes of weather is roughly equivalent to moving about 5% further away from the lake. So I need to move "about" a mile east. Having to move a mile toward the lake sucks for the rich people already living on the lakeshore, but they're the people most able to afford it anyway.
My distant ancestors immigrated to farmland about 100 miles north roughly the same distance from the lake. Absolute worst case screaming eco-nut scenario however highly unlikely, means my GGG-grandkids would have to move 100 miles north to my ancestral homeland to have the same climate as when I was a kid. No big deal.
Wake me when they're growing bananas in Chicago out in the open air, or a hurricane strikes Milwaukee, then I'll get worried about it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century ... hardly a doomsday scenario
I believe you don't realise quite how many people live within a vertical metre of sea level.
they either boil, starve, or poison themselves.
I'd put money on primary energy. Base your whole culture and economy on petrochemicals, use them up, then ? There could be a trillion "successful" civilizations out there right now living a vaguely ancient/medieval lifestyle, with legends of having billions of people burning hundreds of millions of barrels of oil in their distant past, but today its a couple million peasants with wax candles and ox power.
Its a depressing anti-fission anti-fusion anecdote... if any other culture in the universe could have harnessed fission or fusion effectively, we'd currently be a province of their galactic star empire, or at least we'd have detected them by now. Since that seems not to be the case, I'm not overly optimistic about our odds with those energy sources. So when the oil and coal is burned up, that's it. Back to 1700 at best.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's not that hard, but it's useless as climate is a well known chaotic system, so it doesn't matter how precise the model is, it's guaranteed to completely deviate from reality within a few simulation steps. In other words, its predictive power is zero, same with economic models.
Let's compute the total market value of all coastal real estate below 1m elevation before we declare this "hardly a doomsday scenario."
Let's also factor in the costs of re-aligning all land use to the new climate and the impact of that re-alignment on the global food supply.
I'm not qualified to do that analysis, myself -- but I would venture, neither is the Slashdot editor who commented so dismissively on the report.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century ... hardly a doomsday scenario
I believe you don't realise quite how many people live within a vertical metre of sea level.
Well, that's a valid point however hamanity's war with the sea is nothing new and the Dutch have become quite adept at it (with 20% of their country being reclaimed land). Now, that has a whole bunch of caveats about how much trouble they face is that system ever fails and we've all probably heard about that. I would bet that if people believed these reports, some relatively inexpensive measures could be taken to prevent a much more expensive catastrophe. I don't know how much these efforts could help Florida -- an occasional hurricane might make them a bigger problem. But engineers have been tackling this problem.
For the United States, I think a bigger doomsday scenario of this is for agriculture in Texas. Texas already lost $7.62 billion in agricultural this year and if you're telling me that that part of North America is going to get more arid? Well, droughts are something that humans have long had problems with. You can build all the irrigation you want but when that's dried up, there's not a lot you can do. If you like to eat beef and if you like Texas to be a productive state in the union, you should probably be concerned about this.
My work here is dung.
Global warming doesn't care whether you believe in it.
But the people who don't believe in it will not even consider that their Florida beachside home may be under water in a couple of decades. Therefore, the folks who see the seas rising will sell their beach side properties for a premium to the folks who are: sticking their heads in the sand; folks who think GW is a Liberal hoax; and folks who think the property is just high enough that they won't be effected.
1. Find people who don't believe in GW.
2. Sell (currently beach side; underwater later) property to them.
3. Profit!
For all we know we are a province of their empire. Being conquered doesn't mean you are entitled to knowing about it if your technological advancement is so low that you can't participate in the greater galaxy...
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We have been polluting heavily for a hundred years or so, but we are already able to counter the effect of global warming (look at all the schemes for changing climate, from space mirrors to simulated volcanic eruptions, to painting a small part of the earth white). The biggest obstacles are willpower for funding and lack of need/urgency.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I'm pretty sure they mean more accurate. Many people incorrectly use "precise" and "accurate" interchangeably.
The article mentions using faster computers. Anyone who's done modelling knows that you can do more steps in the same amount of time, resulting in increased accuracy. They also mention better modelling.
Acid rain we avoided with a cap and trade system on sulfer dioxides. Much like what they want to do with CO2 since it is already proven to work.
This is a real problem these days, if we solve any issue before the break down of society we get a bunch of ill informed mouth breathers beating their chests claiming there never was an issue.
In principle it can be modelled analytically, if we knew enough to do so. We don't yet though. Our GCMs don't come even close to modelling the historical record with statistical significance. At best they roughly mirror some short-term variations like 100ky cycles and a general increase or decrease in some metrics with the help of fudge factors, but never across multiple geological periods.
The only people expressing confidence about our predictive ability in climatology based on physical modeling are those who hold the scientific method in less esteem than their own reading of tea leaves. We can graph trends of course and extrapolate along them, but that is unrelated to scientific understanding.
We'll get there one day. For now though, beware of shamen wearing the clothes of scientists. If the scientific method isn't being respected, you can guarantee that science is taking a back seat to something less objective.
But don't lose hope. And in the interim, look after our one and only habitable planet. Just because science isn't able to model it accurately yet doesn't mean that it's OK to pollute it. Commonsense applies.
Baloney. It's the political hacks who pounce on something like this and say "Look! The scientists revised their consensus predictions, *obviously* it's just politics because the truth never changes." They say this because politics is the only thing they (think) they understand. It's just as silly as when they get up on their high horses about "revisionist" historians -- revising history is what *actual* historians do. Revising climate predictions is what climatologists do, and in any case the rumors of what the new IPCC (you like them now?) forecasts will contain is well within the range that's been discussed all along, except for a somewhat more pessimistic sea level rise figure. If you'd actually been paying attention to science news instead of political pundits, you'd know that the recent buzz has been the remarkable accuracy of the original 1990 IPCC report (source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1763.html). This is a remarkable piece of support for the anthropogenic hypothesis, since the computer models used in the late 80s relied heavily on atmospheric CO2 accumulation.
The only reason people like you think climate change is politically driven myth is because you weren't paying attention *before* it became a political issue. It was vigorously debated in the scientific literature well before it became a political hot potato -- check the abstracts on Google Scholar if you don't believe me. Now you can pooh pooh a 2 degree rise in global average temperature and 1 m rise in sea level, but that's because you have no idea what the effects of those changes will be. A 1m mean sea level rise means substantially more frequent flooding events. A 2 degree temperature rise has a huge effect on the distribution of vector borne diseases.
It sounds benign to say that there will be "new arid zones in the Southern United States", but only if you don't think about what the appearance of a new arid zone would mean.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just sit back and chill !! You can't do anything about it !! NO !! You CAN'T !!
Not as long as the disinformation campaign is running in the USA, no.
That disinformation campaign wouldn't work if not for the alarmist Chicken Littles all going over-the-top batshit crazy with their alarmism and ruining the credibility of anyone trying to speak calmly about climate change.
Participate does not equal see. The natives saw the guys with muskets and cannons and giant wooden ships, even if they couldn't get involved in court politics or academic research back home.
Another interesting sci fi book plot or whatever is more than one group of savages (aka us, interpret us as pronoun or united states as you wish) might exist. Sure the neo-roman empire ignores and laughs at us savages as a group, but there should be other just slightly more civilized planets, yet still savages compared to the overlords, doing all kinds of stuff we'd notice, like tossing radioactive waste into their sun screwing up the stellar spectrum, or broadcasting RF all over the place, or doing strange things with neutrinos and graviton sources, or extensive civil engineering with H-bombs, or terraforming other planets in their solar system, or attempting to build a dyson sphere, or fill their upper atmosphere with fluorocarbons, all stuff we'd see other savages doing even if the overlords ignored all of us savages as a group, which is interesting.
I've read Kraus et al about interstellar radio detection, I wonder if anyone out there has run similar numbers for pulsed neutrino generation and detection. I don't care quite enough to shovel thru arxiv for hours, but if some /.er has a useful lead to speed the search? That would make an interesting SETI technique with a built in "you must be this tall" sign to keep the rabble out, apparently EM radiation isn't nearly sufficient. "You must build a cryogenic 100 KM gravitation wave detector to participate in the intergalactic interspecies internet" or "You must be able to generate, control, and detect a neutrino flux equivalent to a major particle accelerator with a 10 amp beam current to participate in the interstellar interspecies internet"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
An interesting counter-argument is that we could, by chance, be one of the first civilizations to achieve the technological level we are currently at. Given what we know (or think we know) about the history of star formation in the universe, e.g. that the early stars going nova are the primary source of heavier elements (required for fission, hell, even for semiconductors), this is not unreasonable.
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Those books were garbage and I'm ashamed to have read them. Someone told me they were hard scifi... but instead it was a furry anime style series of bad science. All of his books, in fact, are pretty much garbage.
Maybe you didn't get your science information from the news which as you state likes alarmist predictions you'd have a better understanding of what scientists have actually been saying about all those things for all those years?
This is a deep misunderstanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems. You may not be able to say what the PRECISE state of the system will be, as in exactly when it will rain for the weather, or which region will have exactly what rainfall for climate, but you CAN quite confidently map the basins of the various attractors and understand the ensemble state of the system. In other words you don't have to know the precise climate in every little region to know the overall climate. This is ESPECIALLY true of the climate because there is a phase space that represents the possible states. In other words the laws of physics basically govern the overall climate, if one area turns out a bit drier than you predicted then another one has to be a bit wetter because the rain has to fall SOMEWHERE. Excess heat in the system has to go somewhere, and eventually it has to drive increased evaporation, increased temperatures, etc. This stuff is just constrained by basic physical laws. The only real arguments at this point are about ACTUAL regional conditions and details like whether or not the extra rainfall in an area will fall in big storms or more small storms for instance. It is very true that models will not precisely predict these things. It may be impossible to do so, but that doesn't make the models useless at all.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Actually your assessment is quite good, except it would be applicable to the 1970's. Modern Earth system models are FAR more sophisticated and capable than you are stating. They respond in quite realistic ways to different forcings, reproduce both recent historical temperatures and paleoclimate. They are also virtually entirely physical, containing no 'fudge factors', just basic physics. There are plenty of things that aren't accurately measured and a few significant things that are only partially understood, but when we plug in various different models of those things (say clouds for instance) we can constrain the range of what these unknowns could possibly be hiding. It isn't much. One of the most remarkable facts about climate models is just how consistently they have produced quite similar overall results and how HARD it is to get them to produce really unrealistic results. Even the most grossly simplistic models usually demonstrate significant correspondence with reality. The main area of uncertainty, and one that may possibly be irreducible, are small scale regional predictions. Climate can have a lot of different similar states. It is perhaps impossible even with virtually infinite computer power to predict what the rainfall will be in New England around 2050. The answers you will get in each model run with slightly randomized initial state will vary somewhat. Interestingly though the GLOBAL results are generally rock solid consistent. Chances are this is just a feature of the real world, tiny effects WILL make a local difference, but the overall state of the whole system is constrained by basic conservation laws, so that the large scale predictions are highly accurate (and have generally been shown to be so). Truthfully we may be approaching the limit of what we can usefully do in terms of prediction.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Nope. The political angle has been apparent for quite some time - I figured it was an attempt to stop the developing world from advancing. Say to prevent China and India from becoming the dominant players on the world stage. But prior to the politicization there were the ever conflicting reports just like we see today:
Remember the record hurricane season that was going to be the new norm due to climate change? How about the collapse of the ice shelves in Antarctica that later later started growing - oh, melting will be at the north pole and MORE ice will form at the south. I recall in the 1970's when we were all headed to the next ice age - the computer models all kept falling into something called "white earth" and never warmed up again. At least that is more consistent with the ice cores (looks like we're due for glaciation to start within 1000 years). One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
The same thing happened with Y2K. A lot of people worked very hard to prevent a giant mess and were successful. Since a catastrophe didn't happen, people assume it was all hype and no substance. Would it have ended civilization as we know it? No. Would it have led to a period of great chaos which could have sent the economy reeling (the markets hate chaos)? Yes.
If you work hard enough at averting a crisis, you inevitably get people who second guess whether your efforts averted the crisis or whether the crisis averted itself and you're just trying to claim credit.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So, in other words, data about climate change is only legitimate if it points to dire straits. Got it.
Question for you and other CC hardliners: How is it that any claim of political play in AGW promotion is dismissed as right-wing hyperbole, but doggedly insisting that ANY climate data that casts doubt on the World-Will-End-In-Hellfire hypothesis is politically driven is somehow valid?
No one that appeals to "consensus" has any scientific credibility. "On the word of no one", Nullius in verba, used to be the motto of the Royal Society. It is well hidden these days. It is not featured on the home page. In the 19th century, the Royal Society received money from the British government. This created such a scandal that any further government funding was refused. It was judged scandalous that scientist could depend on government funding. This was during laissez-faire. The British government then bankrupted the universities during the First World War (they had their savings in government bonds). These days, the Royal Society is a stooge of British politicians. Since they are the ones paying. Darwin was a hobby scientist. He was not peer reviewed. He did not work at a university. He did not publish papers. He wrote books. Followingen the IPCC logic, I should have answered that "oh, but the whole physics department agrees with my statement" during the defence of my thesis...