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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.
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.
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!
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.
Global warming doesn't care whether you believe in it.
Stop anthropomorphizing Global Warming. It doesn't like that.
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
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.
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