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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."
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.
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?
Simple: Only old people go to live there so they figure they'll be dead when it happens...
No sig today...
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.
Global warming doesn't care whether you believe in it.
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!
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.
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.
Talking of stupid, anybody who takes this IPCC "draft" trolling seriously are being duped. The IPCC are climate change deniers, hiding behind a thin veil that can hardly be called "science"
The end game of the massive well funded disinformation campaign being to influence as many people as possible into taking strong climate change denial opinion. The problem is, the likes of Fox news and troll news like this one are succeeding very well in this aim, http://environment.yale.edu/climate/the-climate-note/>as this graph shows. Science and evidence be damned.
IPCC Disinformation campaign:
The slide above comes from the presentation of Hans von Storch to the InterAcademy Review of the IPCC, presented earlier this week in Montreal. The slide references the misrepresentation of the issue of disasters and climate change by the IPCC. von Storch is very clear in his views:
Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.
A former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, says the following in the context of the 2035 glacier issue, but could be equally applied to the disaster issue:
The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.
Global warming doesn't care whether you believe in it.
Stop anthropomorphizing Global Warming. It doesn't like that.
I believe that whether or not AGW is true the response should be the same. More nuclear and natural gas. Less ethanol and foreign sourced oil. Drop the stupid subsidies on windmills, solar panels, and electric cars.
Electric cars are now a mature technology. We no longer need to subsidize them since people are buying top dollar electric cars anyway. Electric car subsidies are just the wealthy legislating more more to the wealthy so they can by their status symbols. Also, until we replace coal power with nuclear these cars produce more carbon than a gasoline, diesel, or especially natural gas counterpart.
Windmills rarely produce a net carbon savings because they are still backed up by inefficient natural gas turbines or, the largest culprit of carbon output, coal.
End this insanity with CFL bulbs. I don't like the idea of having fragile, mercury filled, glass tubes hanging over where I eat and sleep. If we had nuclear instead of coal it would not matter what kind of lighting I chose when it comes to carbon output.
If we cannot figure out whether or not ethanol actually saves on carbon or not then perhaps we should not be dumping so much money into it. If people want ethanol then let them have it, just don't make me buy it so you can feel better about yourself. Like the CFL bulb example above this would all be moot if we could get some natural gas and electric (from nuclear) vehicles on the road.
The nice thing about all of this is that it involves reducing government influence on our lives, increases the choices of the consumer, lower taxes, greater wealth for all, and no painful transitions in infrastructure. This is also precisely why it will not happen. AGW is about bigger government, not saving the world.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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