Slashdot Mirror
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."
How did real estate in Florida ever get so overpriced in the run up to 2008, if anyone out there is taking rising sea levels seriously?
Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out .. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else: they either boil, starve, or poison themselves.
If this projection is correct, and the effect grows at an exponential rate, it will be 1 degree for the last century, (order of) 3 for the next, 9 for the one after that, and then it is either super-tech or extinction.
Careful now, humans.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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.
Republic Broadcasting Network.
I'd rather have more accurate models than more precise models.
Bad models don't get any better by adding decimal places.
I expect that accurate modelling of something as complex as climate is really, really hard.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Now with link...
Sorry...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
You're neglecting to account for the onslaught of Captain Planet.
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.
No sig today...
Sorry, but what do you expect a scientist to do?
"Oh well, we did the prediction as scientifically accurate as possible, but it's still a pretty gloomy outcome predicted.
Better tone down the ecological and economical consequences so they can continue with business as usual"?
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.
Olaf Stampf.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Correlation is an important tool. It might be the most important tool.
But, climate scientists use more than correlation. They build ever more accurate models, and test them for their ability to make predictions. Like a lot of science actually.
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!
Just because YOU are ignorant of the methods and the available accuracy doesn't mean everyone is.
What's your preference, ignore the possibility that we could be destroying our world because predicting the future is difficult?
Yeah, good plan.
We just cannot. We cannot even predict the weather more than a few days ahead. Yet somehow we pretend that wee can predict climate 100's of years ahead. Small flaws in the model could result in large errors. We cannot even be sure that we have considered all the relevant parameters.
This is just a case of GIGO.
Climate != Weather.
Bad Car Analogy: Say your car now has 150,000 miles on it. You know that repair bills are going to increase but as to what exactly will break and when, you don't know.
The end goal is the same. They've just finally figured out what the socialists and Marxists have known for a century - that incrementalism is far more effective than "shock and awe" at achieving the end goal, even though it takes a lot longer.
The climate is going to change with or without our help. In the end, it doesn't matter if AGW is real. The climate is going to change, and we had better expend our energies adapting rather than resisting, since, you know, resistance is futile.
Despite all the (legitimate) complaints about disinformation and scientific illiteracy in the U.S., there's this.
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.
Just because YOU are ignorant of the methods and the available accuracy doesn't mean everyone is.
What's your preference, ignore the possibility that we could be destroying our world because predicting the future is difficult?
Yeah, good plan.
I don't think humans will be destroying the world. The world will remove humans from the equation and it will be fine moving forward. It's done it many times before, so there is little to doubt that it will do it again. Now don't jump on this as though I'm not saying to do anything, or that humans have an affect on the environment, because we do. Just like any other living thing, we have an impact on our surroundings. Resources are limited, every living thing takes resources. Some take from other living things.
Finding the magical balance with the Earth and humans will be a tough one to solve. Throw in the 'natural' ebb and flow of the weather and it's even more complicated. The question will be is how good humans really are at adapting to changes in the environment. We will always have an affect on it.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The end conclusion of that story was obviously written by someone who doesn't know much about the situation. Yes, a 12 pack of hurricane Sandies won't level Nebraska but a tiny shift like that with droughts and floods and higher temps will kill off so many species of fish, amphibians, coral, birds, etc that it will disrupt the entire animal kingdom. That won't be so good for the world. You'll be sitting there enjoying your lovely new weather and suddenly you can't buy tuna and the prices in the seafood section of the deli triple.
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.
IPCC being a body with representation from different states (with a lot of political interest in the reports), that more or less work with consensus, their reports are often watered down when released. This means that the published science is often more pessimistic than the IPCC report.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Since when Al Gore's bank accounts are in the third world?
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?
Acid Rain was moderated with a cap and trade, not avoided. Anyone with a swimming pool in the northeast will tell you they have to correct the ph of their pool every time it rains.
Overall, hardly a doomsday scenario.
Look Ma! "Only" 3 degrees rise! Less strong storms, some more rain over here, some less rain over there... I'm sure farmers can just move, and populations will freely follow, with our current situation of open borders worldwide and such... I guess now the IPCC is no longer the CENTER OF THE ILUMINAT--er... CLIMATE CHANGE CONSPIRACY, now it's a reputable scientific report, yeah I think we can *cough* spin *cough*, I mean clearly demonstrate the "change" in "climate change" to be nothing but a small nuisance, why, less strong storms? Maybe it's an improvement! Except, you know, the part about coastal regions... But it's not like some of the most economically important cities are located near the coast, no siree... I mean, what's a meter more in rise than previously expected? Like 3 feet, right? No biggie.
They build ever more accurate models, and test them for their ability to make predictions.
There are now dozens of supercomputers that have been built for the purpose of climate modeling, and on those, hundreds of different climate models have been run.
Now please tell us which one of those hundreds of models shows the best skill at prediction.
Surely we know which model that is.. and surely we know which supercomputers were involved in the simulations.. and surely future funding for bigger and better supercomputers is going towards the refinement of only the best models..
A citation indicating which model shows the best skill at prediction should be pretty easy given these facts. You don't have one because their prediction skill isnt what is being tested.. its their fitting skill that is tested as a proxy for prediction. They dont wait to see which models show skill at prediction.. they put in for new funding for larger supercomputers immediately after they can show that they can fit the data.
"His name was James Damore."
After so many stories came out this year of revised data showing effects worse than previously predicted? I really hope they're not holding back for fear of being labelled "alarmist" by the denialists.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Actually peak oil has happened. Why do you think you are paying $4 for gas, and we are drilling EVERYWHERE for the last dregs, not to mention trying to process tar sands. And why do you think economic growth worldwide sucks? Why do you think global oil production is in a downtrend?
1960's big freeze - I call bullshit. There was never a scientific consensus that this would happen.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
1970's - Ozone layer was preserved because of a concerted global response to remove the cause of it's shrinkage. Duh.
1980's - Aids has killed 15 million people. Go talk to people living in countries where it is pandemic and then come back and tell me nothing has happened.
http://www.avert.org/aids-impact-africa.htm
2003 - SARS. Please cite a claim that it was going to wipe us all out.
2005 - Avian Flu - ditto
2012 - Oh BS.
Alarmist predictions are made alarmist by news reporters. The actual predictions have been pretty much accurate.
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-pair-global.html
Without taking into account all factors, you can't decide if this change in sea level or climate will be good or bad. Will be change. That kind of change could mean that some animals or plants will have better odds of survival, other could have worse. Mankind could adapt to the temperature/sea level change (maybe at a bigger cost that it would cost to prevent it, or maybe not), but some other parts of the environment won't. And we could depend directly or indirectly on them, and it could hit us far harder because dealing with the other changes.
Somewhat worries me that that considered cost on all of this is always economic. If i.e. rice or wheat gets globally affected (because a disease carried by a bug that had a bloom because the change, to put a very simple chain in) millons could starve to death. Mankind could adapt, but the cost should take lives into account.
This article doesn't seem to address what I have been told was the actual greatest danger of global warming, a Northern Hemisphere Ice age.
Popularized by The Day After Tomorrow, the science behind the northern hemisphere entering a mini ice age as a response to large amounts of fresh water melting into the North Atlantic, from ice sheets such as Greenland, is quite sound. I believe it is the leading theory as to what caused The Younger Dryas.
The basic principle rests on the fact that the North Atlantic Deep Water Current, which brings warmth to the Northern Hemisphere, relies heavily on the salinity of the ocean water. Making the water too fresh, as in from melting all the ice, would stop the current and cause a mini ice age. My understanding is that from the time this current is shut down to when the higher latitudes are uninhabitable is thought to be less than half a century.
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
The very notion of a secret draft plays into peoples biases, it also depends on people's ignorance of basic facts. Some easily verifiable facts:
The IPCC conducts it's business in the open and are more than happy to respond to a layman who spots a trivial typo in a draft (as I did circa 2001).
They're expecting ~100K review comments this time around.
The thousands of scientists and others involved do not get a dime from the IPCC, all work is donated (aside from 3-4 permanent office staff).
The IPCC's accounts can also be found via that link.
Their $5-6M annual budget comes from donations by the governments of over 100 countries of all political stripes. Somewhat ironically the bulk of it is spent on airline tickets..
The political construct is unraveling
The headline hit the nail on the head, but I'm pretty sure it's not the nail the GP was aiming at.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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.
An article in Newsweek written by a scientifically-illiterate journalist is not the same as a peer-reviewed article written by an actual scientist working in the field. As to the rest of your nonsense, you do realize that science works by "changing the story" all the time? I guess by your "reasoning" gravity doesn't exist either since we have more refined models than Newtonian gravitational theory.
Love that this gets modded down. But it's so true....
Are coral reefs shrinking due to CO2/global warming or are they shrinking due to toxins, pesticides and other run off.
Places like Florida are in danger, because it's flat, and built over with cement.
But I am curious about soil accumulation and natural biosystems. The 1 meter rise, does it account for a century of soil growth?
My old hometown of New Haven was built in the late 1600's. The town "green" is now almost 1-2 meters higher than it was in the 1700's. Thanks to bio accumulation. Most can see this happen. We had an area that we put dirt and gravel on. Over two years, weeds grew and were chopped down. We probably added a 1/2"-1" or more of top soil over those couple of years. This is a natural biological system.
Problem is, we cement over everything and prevent that natural process.
Perhaps you recall the media making a big deal of global cooling, but the scientific community was not. The story isn't changing nearly so much as people say it is. Popular media is doing a hell of a job of making it sound like this is a controversy. It isn't. There is a great graphic here. Source
.02% of papers speculating that global warming doesn't exist and call it a "controversy".
Climate skeptics have played the media and the general populace like a fiddle. They point to the relatively small number of scientists who speculated on global cooling, and then say, "they can't make up their minds". They pick the
To test the models appropriately takes at least a decade. So, yeah, they're working on it.
In the meantime, they have a number of models written by different groups with different assumptions, etc., and they give broadly similar results.
But I'm sure you have a better approach?
Mod parent up. Science used as a whipping boy for apocalyptic predictions only makes it look like modern day witch-doctoring.
Oh, but you forget, we have this magical thing called "averaging" we can do to these hundreds of different climate models, and voila!, we get to the perfect model that is super accurate! And of course all the assumptions built into the models we averaged (even if they contradicted each other), must be true, true, true! :)
It's like having three dozen models of earth's gravity, which when averaged, come out to 9.8m/s^2, even though none of them hit it on the head - obviously they're *all* perfectly correct :)
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.
So, to be clear: you believe that Manabe and Wetherald's landmark 1967 paper (which built on Manabe and Strickler 1964) that calculated the amount of warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, was work that was actually done "to prevent China and India from becoming the dominant players on the world stage"? Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever? Can you find some 1964 references saying that politicians were seriously worried about "China and India becoming the dominant players on the world stage," much less were instructing scientists to make up data to prevent it?
... 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.
That's been debunked ages ago. The "next ice age" played well in the media-- it made Time and Newsweek--but it was never a scientific consensus. Check out "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus" in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 , or the discussion and links here: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/18/now-out-in-bams-the-myth-of-th/
...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.
Sorry, but this is the way science happens: the overall physics is understood, and then the details are slowly filled and the error bars are refined and the calculations get better.
Let me remind you that the overall physics of the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been remarkably constant. Today's best estimate of the warming effect is still within the error bars of Manabe and Wetherald's original 1967 calculation, and if you plot their predictions against the actual measured temperatures, using the measured values of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the data fits perfectly.
We have pretty good confidence that we know the physics of the greenhouse effect. Scientists has not been "keeping changing your story"-- it's been physics that's been well understood for over a hundred years, and the same overall calculation with the same net result, to within the error bars, for close to fifty years.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If they want to flog this dead horse of a fad back to life.
How about "we're all fucked"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If it weren't for the Montreal protocol, we could have global cooling.
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Nice anti-science rant.
What I expect a scientist NOT to do is scaremongering like:
1950's Peak oil; no more oil in 1970... never happened
Peak oil doesn't mean no more oil.
And peak oil happened in the 1970s; for US production.
BTW which definition of peak oil are you referring to?
1) Maximum oil production has been attained, and it will decrease from now
2) Demand for oil surpasses production
or
3) Rate of new discoveries fall below rate of consumption?
both 2 and 3 happened in the 1970s, but only temporary
1960's Big freeze; a new ice age was about to start (because of constantly FALLING global temperatures)... nothing happened
New ice age? We're still in an ice age.
1970`s Acid rain will wipe us all out by 1985... never happened
Human extinction was never suggested as a possible outcome of acid rain. Enormous amount of money and international agreements reduced the problem to a manageable level. By listening to the scientists we avoided a major ecological crisis.
1970's Overpopulation will lead to famines and mass extinction of humans... nothing happened
Overpopulation has caused famine and mass death of humans in Africa every year since 1970.
1970's The ozone layer will disappear. CFC's were banned; the ozone layer is still growing... nothing spectacular happened
Enormous amount of money and international agreements reduced the problem to a manageable level. By listening to the scientists we avoided a major ecological crisis.
1980's AIDS will wipe all the gay's out... later replaced by 'will wipe us all out'... nothing happened
Nothing happened? Infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa are approaching 10% in several countries; with rates approaching 50% of the adult population in some areas.
2000's Peak Oil; no more oil in 2020... bit early to tell... but I have a hunch
Yeah, nothing will happen. Oil will still cost $20 a barrel just like in 1999. It's obvious we'll never run out.
Global increase in crude oil production has been 0.5% from 2000-2011, and prices have increased from $20 to $90, with peaks close to $150.
Get a 'shopping bag for life' and a 'special light bulb' if you really believe that it will make a difference, but leave me in peace please.
When you have a planet to yourself, you can do what you like. As long as you're sharing with the rest of us, you'd better learn to behave responsibly.
---- Sig. gone.
Here's a good and insighful read of the author of the study that became media's "next ice age" in the 1970s has to say about it: http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_7.html#schneider
He ends with:
It's not global warming that is killing coral reefs. It is ocean acidification.
In a nutshell: as more CO2 is released, it will dissolve into the ocean to maintain equilibrium. As CO2 dissolves into the ocean, the result is an increase in carbonic acid, creating bicarbonate and hydronium ions, which reduce the pH of the ocean.
Under "normal" conditions, the carbonate ions are supersaturated. As pH falls, carbonate ions become undersaturated. In these "abnormal" conditions, calcium carbonate and aragonite (what coral "bones" are made of) are vulnerable to dissolution.
In more plain terms, the coral reef's skeleton is being dissolved faster than the coral reef can build it. Note that the tests for this hypothesis controlled for pollution, so this effect is observed even if the only factor is decreasing pH. From the abstract of the paper cited below, "We investigated the calcification rates of five colonies of the zooxanthellate coral Stylophora pistillata in synthetic seawater using the alkalinity anomaly technique."
^ Gattuso, J.-P.; Frankignoulle, M.; Bourge, I.; Romaine, S. and Buddemeier, R. W. (1998). "Effect of calcium carbonate saturation of seawater on coral calcification". Global and Planetary Change 18 (1–2): 37–46. Bibcode 1998GPC....18...37G. doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(98)00035-6.
:(){
You can claim BS on 2012 on 12/22/2012 if we're still around.
Actually there's nothing to be lost by claiming it now, since there won't be anyone to criticize you if you're wrong.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There is only one method known to science available today which will reliably remove carbon dioxide from the atmostphere for long-term sequestration, but it is entirely feasible in both centralized and distributed models, which is reforestation. I won't get into a ton of details about the value of individual effort vs. collective effort vs. policy activism. Long story short, you're wrong.
Interestingly Brad Werner presented a talk titled "Is Earth F**ked?" at the recently concluded AGU meeting. You can find the abstract and view the presentation here. His answer is probably unless we start seeing the kind of activism around the world like that that accompanied the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam war movement of the 1960's.
We just cannot. We cannot even predict the weather more than a few days ahead. Yet somehow we pretend that wee can predict climate 100's of years ahead. Small flaws in the model could result in large errors. We cannot even be sure that we have considered all the relevant parameters.
This is just a case of GIGO.
Ah, yes. Oceanology is also a crock, because it didn't predict the wave that ruined my sand castle. And astronomy too - no one predicted the meteor I saw last month. They can't even predict how many planets there are around Betelgeuse! If they can't predict the little stuff, how can they claim to know what's going on in the big picture!
I find it comforting to know that creationists have independently discovered this fraud in the nature of scientists, and frequently invoke it to debunk evolution. We're not in this alone, like some kind of fringe group or something.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hopefully the new models are not just continuing a 20-year trend of underestimating the impacts of global warming. Like melting arctic ice.
That trend has been so consistent that I find myself wondering whether the IPCC deliberately shoots low to make their projections more palatable.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Seriously, all you highly intelligent motivated reasoning alarmists out there, the biggest damage that was ever done to your position was the wild exaggeration and apocalyptic doom mongering. Yes, it has been fairly pointed out that there is a contingent of skeptics who scare monger about the "New World Order", and the UN controlling everyone, but that trope hasn't benefitted the CAGW crowd nearly as much as they've been harmed by their own end of the world rhetoric.
Funny, I hear a lot less end-of-the-world rhetoric than I hear accusations of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Also, the biggest damage to widespread knowledge of the truth wasn't done by alarmism, but by shills for Big Oil writing opinion pieces in influential newspapers and magazines.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Then there is just the classic lying about what credibility is. Slashdotters are going to realize at some point that being a disease reservoir for thermocidal mania is going to undermine their credibility.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Thanks for the informative post. I googled, and can confirm the author of TFA is infamous for absurd attacks on climate science and climate scientists. However, according to IPCC's schedule, a 2013 "second order draft" is circulating now to governments, who could be leaking them. While TFA downplays a 1 meter rise in ocean levels by 2100, that number is double it's previous estimate. Given a recent study claims oceans are rising over 3mm per year, even 1 meter may be low. How bad will it be if we see a 3 meter rise?
While the author is a wing nut, I'm encouraged to see these guys shifting away from "the Earth is not warming" to a discussion of how bad the impact will be. If I were Canadian, I could see plenty of upside to global warming. It's not 100% bad, just mostly bad... Shifting to a discussion of the impact would be a huge step forward.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Acidification is a threat to the long-term viability of coral reefs.
However, the reefs that are dying off now are doing so not because of acidification, but by-and-large because of high water temperatures.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Thermocidal mania?
Yeah, you just got a whole bunch of apocalyptic credibility now :)
Great point. I would add that confidence in models comes from a track record of verified predictions.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Here's the rub - there's no reason to reduce our CO2 emissions of there is no catastrophic effect. Only a sufficiently catastrophic consequence would justify the economic hardship one must impose upon the world's poorest through the mitigation of CO2 emissions.
But screams of "omg, the sea rise is accelerating and Florida will drown!" simply seem like hand waving, not science.
Now, if you don't believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause significant harm, great, we're probably on the same page...but I don't think you've thought your defense through very thoroughly.
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...
... I don't see any improvement. Andrew, Katrina and Sandy were just ordinary weather? Desertification of the American south isn't a problem? What happens when Atlanta runs out of water completely?
Even though you've already been thoroughly debunked, I feel the need to chime in about this global cooling malarky.
See, there are two types of gasses that make a difference to these discussions. Carbon oxides and sulphur oxides. Sulphur oxides reflect heat, so warmth from the sun bounces back out into space and the earth cools down a little bit. Fortunately for us, scrubbing our exhaust gasses and purifying our fuels meant that we could stop pumping suplhur oxides into the atmosphere. Yay us!
Carbon oxides behave a little differently, they absorb heat, so any heat that would be radiating out gets caught by the carbon oxides and makes them wiggle a little faster, which warms up all the air around it. Unfortunately, no one has come up with an "easy" way to stop pumping carbon oxides into the atmosphere, everything we have would require us to change what we are doing. We don't want to change, so the science telling us about it must be wrong.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
3mm/yr * 100 yrs = 0.3m
The math you have performed for the numbers that you have presented is off by a factor of 10.
It is apparently $4 for gas because of oil speculation: http://www.globalresearch.ca/perhaps-60-of-today-s-oil-price-is-pure-speculation/8878
Speculation accounts for 60% of the cost of gas they say. Bit of a long read but I'm convinced.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
Did you actually read the summary we're commenting under?
Yes. Did you read the actual article being summarized? Here is a direct quote:
"The field of climate research has advanced since the IPCC's last assessment report, released in 2007, as computers have grown faster and models more complex. In fact, these developments make what insiders say the IPCC's message will be all the more astonishing: The new forecasts, they say, will be more or less the same as the old ones, just more precise."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Which model accurately predicts ENSO?
Also, are you saying that IPCC AR4 WG1 statements on cloud uncertainty are now no longer accurate?
it's in my head
It's not global warming that is killing coral reefs. It is ocean acidification.
No. Ocean pH varies an order of magnitude more than the slight change over the last centuries we believe we can measure.
Coral reefs bleaching due to cold water:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/weeklynews/mar10/cwcoral.html
Coral reefs bleaching due to warm water:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2005-11-02-coral-caribbean_x.htm
it's in my head
1) The report you link to is over four years old.
2) The report merely speculates that futures trading was the cause of oil price increases back then. I realize it is long but you seemed to gloss over the first word in the title which is Perhaps.
3) The report is actually an alarmist advertisement for a book from the Centre for Research on Globalization. The founder of this group has been on the list of "Canada's nuttiest professors, those whose absurdity stands head and shoulders above their colleagues."
4) Even if the report were accurate and timely, it does not refute peak oil. Simple supply-and-demand markets are unable to deal intelligently with limited resources. One of the basic rationales of futures markets is to deal more intelligently with such limitations. IOW, a rise in futures prices is precisely what is supposed to happen when it is clear that a resource will run dry in the future.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Andrew, Katrina and Sandy were just ordinary weather
Yes.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/cei/step6.ytd.gif
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/fig33.jpg
it's in my head
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.
If you don't change your story when data challenges it, you're not doing science. It's that simple.
I understand that "people" (by which *I* mean "some people") are easier to convince if you never change what you say no matter what new evidence comes up. That's because they don't understand the difference between changing your story purely for the effect it has on the listener, and changing your story because you've learned something new. In other words, the "people" you are citing can't tell the difference between dishonesty and honesty. Let's take Antarctic sea ice as an example. "People" may take scientists honest admission that seasonal sea ice is increasing as a sign of dishonesty, but it's a peculiar conspiracy that raises and publishes doubts about itself.
In any even the Antarctic ice kerfuffle turned out not to be related to lowered temperatures at all, but more energetic winds driving the sea ice beyond regions in which it formed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
3mm/yr * 100 yrs = 0.3m
The math you have performed for the numbers that you have presented is off by a factor of 10.
Well, this proofs he's an engineer! .... Or he took the accelleration into account without mentioning it. That would make him a physicist. As those are rare on /., it must be the first.
> 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.
It's very convenient: Whenever arctic ice hits new record lows, denialists can point to Antarctica and say "oh, but THERE it's growing!". It does rely on the audience not remembering the fact that it's winter in the south when it's summer in the north, but that doesn't seem to be a problem!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Funny, I hear a lot less end-of-the-world rhetoric than I hear accusations of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Really? I mean, there's at least one list that I can think of off the top of my head. Never mind the on-going hysteria and end of the world rhetoric that we've been hearing for the last 25 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
The link you provided doesn't seem to support your conclusion that global warming was a politically driven issue in the 70s. What it shows is that the state of research back in the 70s is a political issue for *us today*. That doesn't somehow magically go back and taint the motivations of researchers forty years ago.
The graph in the article is interesting by the way. The number of global cooling or neutral papers grows through the decade, they're just outstripped by the growth in warming papers. What you are looking at is the beginning of the emergence of the global warming consensus, which took place largely without the public or media noticing.
As for overpopulation, I think that's a red herring. Exactly how would you go about using global warming to deny an overpopulation problem? Who actually worries about climate change who isn't also concerned about overpopulation?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
(Correction: Incandescent, not "incidence".)
Table-ized A.I.
Ok. Points taken. I offer a slight rebuttal.
Point 1) I don't think it matters that the report is four years old.
Point 2) the Perhaps means circa not maybe.
Point 3) Judge the content, not the author; certainly not the founder. Disclaimer: the author is F. William Engdahl, apparently a peak oil skeptic and perhaps believes in the abiogenic origin of petroleum. I am not saying that I am or I do.
Point 4) I am not trying to refute peak-oil. I am trying to say that it is possible that speculation could have driven the price of oil up. It's not inconceivable you know, I find it plausible that big money could be gaming the energy markets. If housing/property bubbles can happen, why not commodities/futures bubbles?
I have nothing against the theory of peak oil and have no problem getting my head around the idea that we could someday slowly reach the end of a finite resource and that at that point in time demand would outstrip supply bumping the price of oil (and its futures) up. I don't think that there is any conclusive evidence that we are at peak-oil (or gas) and I don't even think that it would be a bad thing if we were: solar, wind, hydro, nuclear get relatively cheaper - we may enter into a period of global recession while we transition, but we'll get out the other side with some nice tech.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
Well, it's not as simple as you suggest. The data shows that the maximum extent of the Antarctic's seasonal sea ice has grown recently, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if the temperatures were increasing. But temperature isn't the only thing that determines the extent of seasonal ice. There's wind too, and that's what researchers think caused the increase in extent.
Still, it's quite possible for certain regions in a global warming scenario to become dramatically cooler, due to changes in the transport of energy from warmer regions to cooler in ocean and air currents.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you want more accurate models, well you need more data against which to test that model. That requires time traveling into the future at the usual rate in order to collect that data.
Now this might just be a translation error (the original article was in German apparently), but I think the actual details of the story back me up. We read of more computing power, "better" models (probably meaning finer mesh sizes). We don't read of more data.
The last part of the article is interesting.
The IPCC's predictions concerning precipitation, on the other hand, may be more conservative than in the previous assessment. Computer models certainly show a clear trend: In places where it already rains a great deal, it will rain even more; and where it is currently dry, it will grow even drier. That's the theory, at least. The only problem is that, so far, these forecasts have not matched reality.
According to the models, subtropical regions, in particular, are expected to grow drier, with new arid zones appearing in the southern United States, South Africa and Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain. Real measurement data from the last 60 years, though, show no such trend toward aridity. Those regions do experience frequent dry periods, but not more often than they have in the past. One possible explanation is that the slight global warming that has occurred so far is not yet enough to cause observable changes in precipitation.
Model not matching reality to the degree needed is traditionally a sign of an inaccurate model. It may be that the models get better as time goes on. But why should one expect divergence in the short term and accuracy in the long term?
Yep, all the "for policy maker" reports are passed around the donating nations where they get to have a say. They don't have a say in the scientific report they are based on. There's nothing to leak because it's not a secret.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Did you get your $0.50 for that post? If so, did you save it or spend it all at once?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> we may enter into a period of global recession while we transition, but we'll get out the other side with some nice tech.
The economics will have to improve for that to happen. Right most alternatives consume more energy than they produce.
Regional models have been predicting the ENSO months in advance for years. Global models produce oscillations. The timing is never identical with the real events, but this is not actually anticipated to EVER happen, ENSO is weather, not climate, you can predict the existence of weather phenomena, but not specific individual appearances. This has been the state of the art since the mid 90's. Clouds cannot be summarized by "we now understand them" or "we don't understand them", there are a lot of different cloud phenomena. What we CAN say is go ahead and plug in the most optimistic and pessimistic cloud physics assumptions, what happens? You STILL get realistic models that STILL show substantial sensitivity. How do you think the low and high ends of the range are determined? http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm is a good summary of models and their history. They work quite well in terms of global predictions. As far as low level regional predictions it simply may never be possible to produce a single high confidence estimate because the exact pattern that evolves in the real world is partly dictated by processes with extreme sensitivity to input parameters.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Your assessment seems based on several questionable assumptions, including but not limited to the following.
(list of several questionable asumptions)
Yes, it kind of is: that is because here I am only considering the DNA-based thing that lives in three spatial dimension, and one (linear and one-way) temporal direction, replicates, feeds, and where the only 'magic' is the quantum behavior of matter/energy, and the elaborate yet stochastically developed protein folding.
Of course you need life to make life, and there might be a host of other things going on- I may maintain that life may very well be an "Intelligent Shade of Purple", or some multidimensional entity, or that life 'knows' how to evolve itself, but I cannot really conduct reproducible experiments on those otherwise very intriguing notions.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
I searched and found the draft is "in confidence and not available to the general public".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Regional models have been predicting the ENSO months in advance for years
If that was true we'd be in the middle of an El Niño right now, as I'm sure you know :)
ENSO is weather, not climate
Doubtful. The PDO cycle alone is long enough for ENSO to be considered climate, and you can't have an opinion on the PDO without ENSO. Cause and effect.
What we CAN say is go ahead and plug in the most optimistic and pessimistic cloud physics assumptions, what happens? You STILL get realistic models that STILL show substantial sensitivity. How do you think the low and high ends of the range are determined?
Are you saying we know the limits of cloud sensitivity as a feedback to a degree higher than the causative effect of CO2? (That wasn't the case for IPCC AR4, that's why I'm asking. I didn't know we'd come much further).
it's in my head
In short, everything will be same as humanity has had it for the majority of our existence. The GP is right, the world won't change a whole lot.
Call me when you get someone to figure out how the NIMBYs will get over thorium breeder reactors...
But I'm sure you have a better approach?
Yes, my approach is to not to label things that havent been tested as 'ever more accurate.'
But hey... what do I know.. its not like their lack of honesty isnt the reason that I distrust these fucks.
"His name was James Damore."
I predict a meter/day of trolling posts (let's say 12 pt font) to CC updates within the next year (or are we there already?). I don't even know where to start with my mod points...
In general there is little point in debating anonymous cowards, but once your post starts going off about putative predictions of invasions of space aliens, it's pretty clear that there's no content left in the discussion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You cannot divide these things up, CO2 and clouds are not separate things so your question is not sensible. Yes, we have narrowed the range of uncertainty in general. Time marches on and the Earth system is always understood better every year. Each increment of knowledge makes predictions more accurate. The point is that the most extreme possibilities for clouds in either direction just aren't that huge a difference. I mean it is a considerable difference, but no matter what it isn't going to invalidate the conclusions as this uncertainty has been taken into account.
And YES, ENSO is weather. I suggest reading the literature on the subject. It is a recurring instability which exhibits nonlinear behavior and is in fact a classic large scale weather feature. The difference being climate is an overall system state, weather is local transient state. The overall climate occupies a region of phase space around an attractor, weather is just a phenomenon which occurs transiently within certain regions of that phase space.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
You cannot divide these things up, CO2 and clouds are not separate things so your question is not sensible.
Of course it is. If the uncertainty with regards to even the sign of cloud feedback (= state of knowledge at IPCC AR4) then we have no idea whether an increase in CO2 will cause warming or cooling after having accounted for those feedbacks.
Feel free to let me know which papers have narrowed down the uncertainties with regards to clouds since AR4. Those I've read still come to completely opposite conclusions.
And YES, ENSO is weather. I suggest reading the literature on the subject.
Oh I have :) I assume you've accepted that we have no models that are able to predict ENSO then? Do you also agree that cycles in ENSO (increased amounts of El Niño vs increased amounts of La Niña) are what causes the PDO cycle - and that it's a cycle over ~60 years and thus is what's considered climate (>30 years)?
I'm less sure whether you tried to claim the effects of ENSO being strictly local. If so, I'd have to ask you to .. read the literature.
it's in my head