How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb?

barlevg sends this excerpt from an article at MotherJones: "It was a stunning figure: $60 trillion. Such could be the cost, according to a recent commentary in Nature, of 'the release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia... a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012.' More specifically, the paper described a scenario in which rapid Arctic warming and sea ice retreat lead to a pulse of undersea methane being released into the atmosphere. How much methane? The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of this hard-hitting greenhouse gas (a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons) between 2015 and 2025. This, in turn, would trigger still more warming and gargantuan damage and adaptation costs. ... According to the Nature commentary, that methane 'is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly.' Such are the scientific assumptions behind the paper's economic analysis. But are those assumptions realistic—and could that much methane really be released suddenly from the Arctic? A number of prominent scientists and methane experts interviewed for this article voiced strong skepticism about the Nature paper.'"

Comments

Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[BillCable]

I supposed the 15-year pause in global warming has prompted alarmists to come up with even more extreme catastrophes.

Control

[amiga3D]

I worry about things about as much as I have control over them. Things like this I have Zero control so I have Zero worries. About the same I worry about a comet impacting the planet. It might happen and there is nothing I can do. Why worry?

Re:Control

[ackthpt]

I worry about things about as much as I have control over them. Things like this I have Zero control so I have Zero worries. About the same I worry about a comet impacting the planet. It might happen and there is nothing I can do. Why worry?

According to some studies we've already crossed the tipping point and it's going to happen. So even if every government and every state and every person suddenly did everything they could to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we're going to get that methane anyway.

Where we'll see it is where it affects the flora and fauna directly (altering availability of species in the food chain) and weather - more greenhouse gasses mean more disruption to weather patterns. Some places will get hotter, some will actually get cooler, some will get more precipitation and others will get less, over time this will shape the world we live in and our own food sources.

Time to put REM - End of the World on the iPod and look at housing on higher ground.

Re:Control

[Danathar]

Yea, you might as well be worrying about a gamma ray burst from a distant star blasting it's way over the Earth. Or maybe a stray black hole wandering it's way through the solar system.

What point is there in worrying about it.

Re:Control

[Danathar]

"Some places will get hotter, some will actually get cooler, some will get more precipitation and others will get less, over time this will shape the world we live in and our own food sources."

Isn't that the way it's always been?

Re:Control

[Aighearach]

I worry about things about as much as I have control over them. Things like this I have Zero control so I have Zero worries. About the same I worry about a comet impacting the planet. It might happen and there is nothing I can do. Why worry?

You actually do have some control over how it affects you based on how you respond to it if it happens.

Re:Control

[gmuslera]

Odds? People worry about shark attacks and not about car accidents, even if car accidents are 200.000 times more probable. And could be some way of control damage, to protect against some of their effects (i.e. not moving to coastal cities, that should be under sea in some yars), or at least stop paying, cheering and defending the culprits of screwing us all.

Re:Control

[Time_Ngler]

Having a better idea of what the future will bring regardless of your control still should be something you think about. What if your doctor told you had incurable cancer and will die within 6 months? Would you continue to go to work as normal, because you have no control over it, or would you party like there is no tomorrow?

What if were studying advanced basket weaving in college and the job market soured in basket weaving? Would you not worry about it because have no control over the job market, or would you switch majors to something more potentially profitable?

So, then if there is a good chance that the environment will be get extremely fucked up (not sure of this, but just for argument's sake), would you put off that trip around the world 10 more years like you were planning to, or would you take it now? Would you have a family and curse your children to live in a dystopian future, or would you take the humanitarian route and have no kids?

Re:Control

[ackthpt]

"Some places will get hotter, some will actually get cooler, some will get more precipitation and others will get less, over time this will shape the world we live in and our own food sources."

Isn't that the way it's always been?

Yes, but generally these changes have been gradual. We're seeing significant changes in the start of seasons, insect life cycles, migration of birds, etc. over a short time span.

Re:Control

[clarkkent09]

The only long term solution for human race is colonizing other planets. Having all our eggs in one basket is a bad idea regardless of who is right about the severity of the impact of global warming.

Re:Control

[tnk1]

Global warming or not, you're absolutely correct. The longest we've got is about 400 million years or so before the Sun starts making it impossible to live on the planet. And an incoming rock or some other unexpected, catastrophic occurrence is likely to show up much sooner than that. We'll need to leave eventually, one way or another, or perish. That is simply a fact.

Re:Control

[rolfwind]

Yeah, about that, there's no habitable planets close by, like within even a generation or two of constant travel, and seeing as my weatherman has problems predicting 5 days out, I think terraforming the moon or Mars or whatever is a pipe dream right now.

OTOH, humanity can change it's tactics, if forced to. The only question will that force going to be strong leadership or nature herself? I think strong leadership will be much more forgiving in the long haul.

What we have to do is put real money into fusion, build more plants, and battery tech for cars. Keep this planet alive for a few more thousand years.... so, Idk, our species will survive to the point we're ready to colonize (if ever).

Re:Control

[JTsyo]

well if we can't stop it, I say we capture it and sequester it in cows.

Re:Control

[Deadstick]

OK, we'll put you in charge of persuading other people to get on the spaceship so it'll be nicer here for you.

Re:Control

[bobbied]

Oh yea, here we go.

This idea is NUTS right now. The closest planet we *might* be able to make a go of is Mars. It's pretty cold there and there is little water or other resources we could easily make use of. It's just not practical to think that we could do anything useful on Mars. But, we could go outside the Solar System right? Not so fast...

The radiation in space is pretty much going to kill anybody or living thing that tries to exit the solar system. Providing enough shielding to make a 10 year (one way) trip to some close earth like planet is going to take a HUGE amount of mass and then you have to come up with a way to get all that mass moving in the right direction, and stop it when you get to the destination. This is obviously not possible.

Now if you want to go figure out how to make some star trek hyper-drives and transporters, go for it.. You are going to need technology like that if you are going to do what you suggest... But it's not happening in your lifetime..

Re:Control

[tnk1]

To be fair, all he was trying to say is that "global warming" will have unpredictable local results due to the heterogeneous make-up of the atmosphere as well as other features. For instance, Great Britain is on the same latitude as Labrador and Newfoundland, but has considerably more temperate weather. That's because of the circulation of the air in the atmosphere. Things like the Gulf Stream (but not necessarily the Gulf Stream itself) could cause the extra heat to be distributed unevenly.

We need to remember that heat in these cases is energy that powers the "engines" that produce our weather. Much like electricity can be used to heat and cool, if it is pumped through the right engine, there are natural processes that could cool the planet locally if they receive more energy.

Of course, eventually steadily increasing heat in the system will simply overwhelm any cooling features, and you'll get Venus out of it. However, that's not going to happen overnight and not without some unusual effects. It may not even happen at all if there are some special cases of equilibrium for the Earth, but those points may still be at a very uncomfortable place for humans.

So, the guy who is blaming the unusually hot weather this summer directly on global warming is just as misguided as the guy who is suggesting that since this is the coldest year on record, global warming is a joke. Determining cause and effect in weather in the long term is still not as much of a complete science as we'd like.

None of this is meant to suggest that I know the truth of whether a global warming disaster is going to come to pass, but I know enough about climate and weather to know that changes to the former can have interesting, sometimes counter-intuitive effects on the latter.

Re:Control

[Deadstick]

Bearing in mind that "shark infested water" is pretty much any seawater not cold enough to cause severe hypothermia...

Re:Control

[Danathar]

But there has been periods in the past where it was not gradual? (you said "generally") So this has happened before? So what is so special about it happening again? Mind you it might very well suck for us, but given it happened before why again should I be surprised that it's happening again?

Re:Control

[Urkki]

But you do have control. Perhaps not control of climate change, but control of how you can adapt your own life to it. It could mean everything from learning practical skills (or acquiring syanide pills for the whole family) for a potential total economic collapse scenario with subsequent famine, pestilence, war and death, to going to an Arctic safari to see wild polar bears while there are any left.

Perhaps "worry" is wrong word, but you should be concerned, same as you'd be concerned about a hurricane or a blizzard heading your way.

Re:Control

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If the people in 1913 slowed their economy 20% in an attempt to "help" us with global warmiing problems in 2013, we'd be at 1992 level technology. Some "help", millions-of-deaths-wise.

Similarly we'd be idiots to force 2092-level technology on 2113 in an attempt to "help" them, when the difference between then and now is far greater than between now and 1913.

20% is probably a gross underestimate. We have ample long-term examples of shifting and slowing rates of advancement and patents as economic climates change.

Re:Control

[CreatureComfort]

Time to get into the business of selling survivalist rations.

Either you will have helped a lot of people weather the coming disasters, or will have fleeced a lot of gullible suckers. Either way, you win!

Re:Control

[holmstar]

The Sun will likely remain much as it is for the next 5 billion years or so (when the hydrogen begins to run out). So we don't have too much to worry about there, unless you're concerned for your descendants 250 million generations into the future. I figure that if we've managed to stick around that long, it's unlikely that the sun going red giant is going to be much of an issue.

I think our most imminent threat is biological. It won't be all that long before some wacko can engineer a virus in his/her basement that could potentially end humanity. Or something new could pop up naturally and spread around the world before we have a chance to react. Maybe it wouldn't wipe out everyone... after all, there are people that live in pretty remote places, but it could easily end civilization as we know it.

Re:Control

[holmstar]

This is obviously not possible.

It could theoretically be done with a nuclear pulse ship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

Re:Control

[clarkkent09]

There is no reason why we won't have a functioning colony on Mars within 2-3 decades from now, which is no time at all. In fact I think it is very likely to happen. Now, a self-sustaining colony that can keep the human race going should Earth be wiped out is a little bit further off but it can be done. If your time frame is a few decades, perhaps 100 years, rather than right now, it is not nuts at all.

Re:Control

[khallow]

Yeah, about that, there's no habitable planets close by, like within even a generation or two of constant travel, and seeing as my weatherman has problems predicting 5 days out, I think terraforming the moon or Mars or whatever is a pipe dream right now.

But terraforming won't be when it gets done.

What we have to do is put real money into fusion, build more plants, and battery tech for cars. Keep this planet alive for a few more thousand years.... so, Idk, our species will survive to the point we're ready to colonize (if ever).

We've already done that, spending money on the very things you mention. And you know what? The internal combustion engine might not be the most efficient engine out there, but the standard automobile fuel tank is the most efficient way to store energy out there (at least until you get to strong/weak force-based storage such as fission, fusion, nuclear isomers, anti-matter, etc).

OTOH, humanity can change it's tactics, if forced to. The only question will that force going to be strong leadership or nature herself?

I suggest nature. At least, you'd have a valid reason for changing tactics rather than because some idiot decided carbon was bad.

Re:Control

[khallow]

The closest planet we *might* be able to make a go of is Mars.

And it would be adequate. We also can colonize many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Mercury, the Moon, a vast number of asteroids, etc.

Providing enough shielding to make a 10 year (one way) trip to some close earth like planet is going to take a HUGE amount of mass and then you have to come up with a way to get all that mass moving in the right direction, and stop it when you get to the destination. This is obviously not possible.

Fission powered electric propulsion. Just increase the travel time well beyond ten years and those propulsion systems become viable.

Re:Control

[khallow]

We have to clean up our act here or we will go extinct, period.

Nobody did that math, contrary to your claim.

Re:Control

[bobbied]

Oh great idea... Let's add a nuclear explosive device to the mix of radiation sources we have to shield from. Question is how fast can it get you going?

If you manage to get to the speed of light, it's going to take some 15 years just to make it to the nearest star... Human life is NOT going to survive the radiation exposure over that length of time. The other issues of weightlessness and providing life support (food, water, air) pale in comparison to the radiation exposure issue. Those we could solve... But the Radiation exposure and the times involved in the trip, not so much.

Re:Control

[perceptual.cyclotron]

Indeed. Europe and much of N.Am already seem to be experiencing a certain amount of cooling because arctic meltwater is disrupting both the gulf stream and the jet stream... Local predictions are hard – both spatially and temporally. Hence why no one credible worries too much about them (except, e.g., weather forecasters, or modellers trying to develop better methods to deal with fine resolutions – but that's a whole other ball game).

Re:Control

[bobbied]

Mars is certainly NOT a very nice place to visit and unsuited for setting up a self contained, self supporting human colony. The amount of technology required will simply not be possible to maintain using the resources of Mars alone but will require constant resupply from Earth. Even on a warm day it is COLD there and the radiation exposure on the surface over long terms would be a serious problem for human life.

Other locations you mention are either too hot or way to cold and ALL of them lack breathable atmospheres. Many would provide even less shielding and ALL would require continued dependance on resupply from earth...

On the travel time... This is EXACTLY the issue. It takes a LONG time to get just about anywhere outside the solar system. The radiation exposure in space is survivable for short terms, but when you have that kind of exposure for YEARS, it's going to kill a significant percentage of the crew. They will suffer increased rates of fatal cancers and birth defects will be rampant. A 10+ year trip to our next door neighbor would pretty much mean death for all on board just because of radiation exposure. So, to make this work, we are going to have to travel faster than light, something that seems to be difficult to accomplish.

Re:Control

[radtea]

So even if every government and every state and every person suddenly did everything they could to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

TFA also mentions this "abstinence only" "solution" to the problem of climate change, and I'm damned curious: given that "just say no" is a proven failure in every single area of social policy where it has ever been attempted, and given that this failure is well-known and frequently derided on the Left, why is it that every single liberal person on the planet thinks that it is the only "proven effective" means of reducing human impact on the Earth's climate?

The purveyor's of abstinence-only solutions have--demonstrably--zero interest in actually solving the problems they purport to be concerned about, but are in every single case primarily interested in controlling the behaviour of other people. This is demonstrable because if they were interested in solving the problems the claim to be concerned about, they would be willing to enact social policies that had a chance of reducing those problems, whereas "abstinence only" is empirically proven to always increase them.

One can only assume that the same is true of "abstinence only" climate crusaders: they don't actually care about the Earth's climate. They are simply glomming on to a convenient excuse to impose their controlling little will on everyone else.

Unfortunately, for those of us who are actually worried about the planet's future, they are standing in the way of a myriad of approaches--such as increased reliance on nuclear power--that would actually help solve the problem.

Re:Control

[khallow]

Mars is certainly NOT a very nice place to visit and unsuited for setting up a self contained, self supporting human colony.

Well, I guess you have to build a little infrastructure then to acquire the resources you need which are all present on the surface of Mars and to provide the living environment you need. Next.

0

Other locations you mention are either too hot or way to cold and ALL of them lack breathable atmospheres.

I guess we'll have to build infrastructure to provide that then. Next.

On the travel time... This is EXACTLY the issue. It takes a LONG time to get just about anywhere outside the solar system.

Ok, it takes a long time. We'll just have to be patient then. Next.

The radiation exposure in space is survivable for short terms, but when you have that kind of exposure for YEARS, it's going to kill a significant percentage of the crew.

Ok. Need radiation shielding - lots of it. No need for FTL.

Ok, you've probably never thought about these sorts of problems before. I guess there's no shame in that. You are right about the time issue. It's not like we're going to do this in the next few decades nor will it be a short hop over to any other star systems. And this stuff probably will never ever matter to you.

The thing is, most of these obstacles are just standard engineering problems about which we already know a number of solutions including some already working stuff on Earth. I guess I just don't get the point of trying to exaggerate the difficulty of doing things in space.

Re:Control

[amiga3D]

Well that's one solution. You could start a nuclear war, kill off about 5 billion or so people and the nuclear winter should leave maybe 1 million or so survivors who will exist for centuries in a new stone age. That might stop global warming. Good luck with the Prius though. That's like spitting in the ocean.

Re:Control

[amiga3D]

Oh, you mean prepare for a global disaster that might happen tomorrow or maybe 50 years from now? While I continue to live an existence where I go from payday to payday trying to figure out how to pay my bills? Face it, if this thing goes like the most pessimistic of these guys think then I'm dead. I can sit here and shit my pants over it or I can continue to live my life and enjoy it as much as possible while I have it. People that rant over stuff like this must have wonderful lives with no other worries.

Re:Control

[WalksOnDirt]

The only time I'm sure it was more rapid than this was 800,000,000 years ago, when we went from a near snowball to a tropical world. There was no land life back then.

It probably won't get that bad, though.

Re:Control

[riverat1]

What about the Sharknado? :/

Re:Control

[david_thornley]

No matter what happens with the methane and other pollutants and greenhouse gasses, the Earth will remain a positively wonderful place to live compared to anywhere else in the Solar system. Nor have we anywhere near the resources and technology to put a self-sustaining colony (the only sort that would help species survival) anywhere off-planet.

Re:Control

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

Oh great idea... Let's add a nuclear explosive device to the mix of radiation sources we have to shield from.

Doesn't really matter what propulsion mechanism you use, they are all going to look like explosions.

If you manage to get to the speed of light, it's going to take some 15 years just to make it to the nearest star...

Antimatter-matter propulsion can in theory reach near the speed of light and Gliese 581 with a confirmed set of exoplanets in the habitable zone would then be reacheable in >22 years (speed of light limit).

Human life is NOT going to survive the radiation exposure over that length of time.

Travelling near the speed of light also would make it more probable that small particle collisions head on would shower energy like in the LHC, so we'd need good enginneering. Radiation is just high energy particles. Some have positive or negative charges and could be deflected by a magnetic field. Others that are neutral you'd want to make it so that they don't head your way (and instead out into space) or find a process that does not produce them.

Re:Control

[khallow]

Guess I have to repeat myself. Nobody did that math.

Re:Control

[rtb61]

Yep, pretty much the way it has always been, 'er', PRIOR TO COASTAL CITIES HOUSING BILLIONS.

Capitals to bring the point home. If it was a natural event, we still would be forced to attempt to prevent it because of it's impact. As a man made event, it is logical to stop carrying out the action that is causing it. No we can not simply twiddle our thumbs and let our major coastal cities flood out, whether natural or man made. Seriously any person who actively works to bring it about should have their assets confiscated and be imprisoned for the rest of their life.

Re:Control

[ultranova]

The Sun will likely remain much as it is for the next 5 billion years or so (when the hydrogen begins to run out).

Stars get brighter as they advance through the main sequence.

Re:Control

[Eunuchswear]

No need to send actual people. I'm sure we'll soon be able to design machines that can assemble human DNA from scratch, gestate it in atificial wombs, and then rear the resulting young. As always, it is an engineering problem, just not the way you thought.

Now imagine the mental health problems of childen raised by machines.

Re:Control

[Raenex]

According to some studies we've already crossed the tipping point and it's going to happen. So even if every government and every state and every person suddenly did everything they could to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we're going to get that methane anyway.

If you read the second link from the Slashdot summary, the catastrophic methane release is highly disputed by other scientists, and for good reasons.

"Methane Bomb"?

[Andrio]

Oh god, here come the jokes.

Re:"Methane Bomb"?

[MarkRose]

Hey man, it's funny if you look on the lighter side.

How much?

[no-body]

Very - like 1000 %. The ignoring of all the environmental issues by the people able to change track will surely lead to a runaway situation in earth climate.

There seems to be a large part of the US population thinking global climate change is a non-issue. Good luck with all of that!

Re:How much?

[jellomizer]

So I should be in a pure panic right now because of everything.

There are a lot of issues in the world to worry about. I choose not to worry about global warming, not because I don't think it is a problem, but because I have my own sets of things I worry about and feel like spending my time advocating.

I find that it is a big deal on how American Education puts such little focus on Math and Science, and passes it off as something that is OK not to know.

As far as I am concerned, if my cause got priority, the next generation would be better at math and science, be able to accept the findings about climate change. Then be able to put more pressure on our leaders to do something about it. There are too many people right now who threw lack of scientific knowledge fall pray to pseudoscience from say supporters of Oil industries, without seeing the major flaws in their reasoning, because they stated their "facts" so elegantly, and with authority.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eeesh. Are you trolling for spelling pedants?
"who threw lack of scientific knowledge fall pray to"
should be ;
who through lack of scientific knowledge fall prey to...
Maybe less STEM for you and more English!

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, what? You sound like you believe climate change is problematic, but you're going to leave it for the next generation of people to do something about it. Time is a bit of a factor when it comes to what we can do about climate change, and I don't think even if education instantly became the biggest priority of everyone in the country that it'd still do that much good in, say, the two years till 2015.

Re:How much?

[gl4ss]

worry 1000%? what the fuck.

that makes as much sense as the methane "costing" the worth of world economy.

let's triple worry on a sorry lorry, that'll make it better.

Re:How much?

[jellomizer]

Yes I will leave it to the next generation, however I would like to make sure the next generation has better tools then I do.

Re:How much?

[wisnoskij]

At least most of them live near the coast.
I am sitting pretty at over 200 meter above sea level.

Re:How much?

[dgatwood]

Time is a bit of a factor when it comes to what we can do about climate change ...

No, no, it really isn't. Remember that all of that carbon was in the atmosphere before. Therefore, Earth had a functioning biosphere even under much worse circumstances than the current state of affairs. The assumption that the greenhouse effect will "run away" and kill all life is preposterous. If it were going to do so, it would have happened billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here having this discussion.

Instead, what we have is the risk of having to change farming practices to sustain the population, build desalinization plants to provide more water to crucial farming areas, build dikes around cities near the coast, and so on. Those are technical problems that are thoroughly understood; the only thing required is funding to do it. Or, we can try to reverse global warming, either by artificial carbon sequestration, moving to cleaner energy, or solar radiation management, all of which are also technical problems that are mostly doable, given enough resources.

So at some point, things will get bad enough that people will decide to commit resources to it. At that point, we'll pull ourselves up out of the hole.

BTW, perversely, one of the best things we can do is build the Keystone XL pipeline. When things get bad, these pipelines could be cleaned and reused to transport desalinized water from the gulf up to farming areas. :-)

Re:How much?

[phantomfive]

There is basically no scientist that is worried about the scenario in the paper. The IPCC, for example, didn't even mention it in their report because they decided the possibility was so remote. Even the paper itself fully admits it's a hypothetical scenario.

It's ok for scientists to examine hypothetical scenarios. Nature and Science both are general interest science magazines (where 'general' means people who are somewhat science literate). They published this story because people might find it interesting, not because it's a realistic scenario.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't all in the atmosphere at the same time, dipshit. It took millions of years to accumulate, and we've released it all in the span of about 200 years.

Re:How much?

[tnk1]

No, no, it really isn't. Remember that all of that carbon was in the atmosphere before. Therefore, Earth had a functioning biosphere even under much worse circumstances than the current state of affairs.

That carbon may have been in the atmosphere before, but it may not have been the atmosphere *at the same time* at these levels. And more to the point, if it ever was at those levels, the climate might not have been quite as calm as we might like it to be.

Plants and other lifeforms have been working for hundreds of millions of years to sequester large amounts of carbon in the crust. We are putting that back into the system in just a few centuries. It is possible that a rate of change like that could cause more extreme changes.

Re:How much?

[IanCal]

. The assumption that the greenhouse effect will "run away" and kill all life is preposterous. If it were going to do so, it would have happened billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here having this discussion.

It can kill all of *us* though. I don't see it as OK if we all die but some bacteria survive.

Or even, you know, *lots of people*. The Earth has been incredibly inhospitable for long periods of time

So at some point, things will get bad enough that people will decide to commit resources to it. At that point, we'll pull ourselves up out of the hole.

Awesome, so the plan is to wait until lots of people are dying and everythings pretty fucked up, *then* start solving the problems. Sounds perfect, can't see a flaw there.

Re:How much?

[holmstar]

Why would we have to go back to the middle ages??? Build nuclear reactors! Lots of them. Make personal vehicles electric, or produce gasoline from atmospheric CO2. There are already processes developed that can do this, though it has not been implemented at an industrial scale due to energy cost, if we have plentiful power from nuclear reactors, we could use off-peak power to generate fuel. Stop shipping products across the planet when we can produce them locally. This handful of items would eliminate the vast majority of carbon positive CO2 output and could be started today if we chose to do so.

Re:How much?

[khallow]

You sound like you believe climate change is problematic, but you're going to leave it for the next generation of people to do something about it.

What's wrong with that? The next generation of people isn't going to be a bunch of helpless bobbleheads. And in the meantime we have bigger problems than climate change. For example, desertification is going to destroy as much arable land in a year or two as climate change is alleged to do (ignoring I might add creation of new arable land in the northern hemisphere) by 2100. That's roughly two orders of magnitude more destruction of farmland. Similarly, somewhere around a billion people are still living in abject poverty. Doing nothing about climate change helps those people more than doing something does, because the former doesn't hinder the global economy - the engine by which those people are being lifted out of poverty.

So what should we do? Addressing the more important problems of today, which will in turn have a far more beneficial effect on the future than slight mitigation of climate change? Or squandering vast resources on ineffective climate change mitigation, which incidentally our descendants will be fully capable of dealing with?

Re:How much?

[perceptual.cyclotron]

The assumption that the greenhouse effect will "run away" and kill all life is preposterous.

Maybe that's why no one credible has ever suggested such a thing? Indeed, it almost sounds like some kind of deliberately hyperbolic straw-man... But I'm sure I'm just being paranoid.

Re:How much?

[no-body]

Frankly, they can theorize as much as they want - up or down the scale a couple of %. Just use common sense and look how much fossil stuff is sent into the atmosphere and how long it took to generate it - millions of years perhaps and it's shot up in maybe 300 years at the most with increasing amounts.

Something's gonna give, but it eludes many people with explanations running from "it's gods work and will" over "earth is 6000 years old" to "there is no global warming" and "the US government can't change the weather because other countries pollute more"...

Results? All what counts is increasing profit, a principle used world-wide as the holy grail of running things on this planet at the cost of other values - and it shows more and more.

Re:How much?

[phantomfive]

Frankly, they can theorize as much as they want - up or down the scale a couple of %. Just use common sense and look how much fossil stuff is sent into the atmosphere and how long it took to generate it - millions of years perhaps and it's shot up in maybe 300 years at the most with increasing amounts. Something's gonna give

That's an intuition

Re:How much?

[Seumas]

When you have assholes like Gore and everyone else promoting end-of-the-world global-warming (oh, wait, it's "climate change" now) when they are also responsible for creating and profiting massively off the whole "carbon credits" market that they built around it (which do nothing for the climate and environment and only serve to make these profiteers wealthier), you can't really blame skeptics for being even more skeptical.

Additionally, $60 trillion isn't that much. The last number I saw for our estimated *real* US debt is something like $72 trillion. If one government can suck down a $72 trillion debt, the entire planet can suck down $60t.

Re:How much?

[drinkypoo]

So I should be in a pure panic right now because of everything.

Hyperbole alert. Parent comment did not say you should panic.

There are a lot of issues in the world to worry about. I choose not to worry about global warming, not because I don't think it is a problem, but because

But because otherwise you would have to change your behavior.

As far as I am concerned, if my cause got priority, the next generation would be better at math and science

Waiting for the next generation to solve the problem is how we got here.

Re:How much?

[drinkypoo]

No, no, it really isn't. Remember that all of that carbon was in the atmosphere before. Therefore, Earth had a functioning biosphere even under much worse circumstances than the current state of affairs

For a value of "functioning" that doesn't include humans. When CO2 levels are very very high the only things that can survive are plants and bacteria. Is that the biosphere of your dreams? If not, perhaps we should be sequestering carbon, rather than releasing it.

BTW, perversely, one of the best things we can do is build the Keystone XL pipeline. When things get bad, these pipelines could be cleaned and reused to transport desalinized water from the gulf up to farming areas. :-)

I'm sure you meant it as a joke, but anyway... Except they can't, because carrying seawater is a different job from carrying oil. The pipeline we should be building would carry seawater from the ocean to the desert. We would then use the seawater to grow algae. When the water becomes too salty, evaporate it for salt.

Re:How much?

[dgatwood]

A pipe is a pipe. It's a sealed metal tube that a liquid goes through. And with only minor impeller changes, a pump is usually a pump.

Besides, even for growing algae you probably wouldn't move seawater, for three reasons:

• Any water that you turn into fresh water for drinking or non-algae irrigation purposes would result in extra salt that you'd need to truck somewhere. Better to do the desalinization at the seaside where you have a place to readily dump the extra salt (a few miles out).
• At the seaside, you can use tidal electricity to power the process without transporting the power halfway across the country. Thus, it is more power-efficient to do desalinization before you put it through the pipes, assuming any significant portion of the water must be desalinated.
• Salt water is more corrosive than fresh water. By pumping fresh water across the country instead, you keep most the corrosion in one place (the desalinization plant) instead of dealing with it everywhere throughout the pipeline network.

If you want to grow algae with it, you can always truck the salt in and add it at the end of the line. That said, most forms of algae don't care whether they have salt water or fresh water, so the only reason to do so would be if you were growing one of the few varieties that does care.

Re:How much?

[drinkypoo]

You use seawater because it's cheap. Desalination costs money. You put it into pipes made out of recycled plastic bags or something and flush it into the desert. The viscosity is a lot lower than oil so you don't need to use as much pressure. Or you can use glass, there's been some work on glass solar thermal heat pipe pumping. For the purposes of growing algae in ponds it doesn't really matter if the water is salt or fresh, so if it made sense to desalinate, you wouldn't put the salt back in.

Re:How much?

[Raenex]

When CO2 levels are very very high the only things that can survive are plants and bacteria.

And your reference for this is...?

Re:How much?

[no-body]

Additionally, $60 trillion isn't that much. The last number I saw for our estimated *real* US debt is something like $72 trillion. If one government can suck down a $72 trillion debt, the entire planet can suck down $60t.

So - what do you actually suggest?

Do nothing or more - of so, what? I only see some blame and a few numbers.

Re:How much?

[holmstar]

We know a lot more about building reactors now than when those were built. Even if we do have some more accidents, we release more radioactive material into the air from burning coal than what was released in those three incidents. We would still be better off.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Salgak1]

Mind you, not sure where this seabed warming is supposed to come from, with Global cooling (due to lower Solar output. . . .) And temperatures during the Medieval Optimum were even higher that the peak of the current warming, and no sudden volatilization of Methane Clathrates. . . Agreed: nothing to see here. . .

Catastrophe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it seem that around every corner there is a new totally natural and cyclical process that the news is going to kill us? I am tired of all this. The Earth is a very complex system and we and it will adapt. I think we should actually understand the natural cycles and integrate ourselves so we are not fighting against it all the time.

Permaculture is the future.

Re:Catastrophe?

[jellomizer]

Because pending DOOOOOOM is News.

The problem I see it, is that we already passed the threshold. But we didn't know where the threshold was until we passed it. Now we just need to factor in how are we are going to adapt to the changes, not as much trying to stop it.

Re:Catastrophe?

[ackthpt]

We're all doomed. Some are more doomed than others.

Re:Catastrophe?

[icebike]

Exactly.

When was the last seabed warming, and how devastating to life on earth was it?
Over the history of earth, there were much warmer periods with far smaller ice caps.
Do those periods correspond with huge species die off?
Or was it exactly to opposite?

Re:Catastrophe?

[UnknowingFool]

I think we should actually understand the natural cycles and integrate ourselves so we are not fighting against it all the time.

The whole point of climate change is that it is not natural that we put large quantities of CO2 into the air.

Re:Catastrophe?

[riverat1]

The most likely candidate for the last seabed warming of this potential magnitude was about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. That period did coincide with a lot of extinctions.

Re:Catastrophe?

[Black Parrot]

Exactly.

When was the last seabed warming, and how devastating to life on earth was it?
Over the history of earth, there were much warmer periods with far smaller ice caps.
Do those periods correspond with huge species die off?
Or was it exactly to opposite?

How many mega-cities were right by the seashore during those previous times?

Re:Catastrophe?

[dcw3]

For the same reason that the media loves to use the word pandemic at every opportunity. How many people actually died from SARs or Bird Flu? Compare that to how many die on the highway every single day. Scare people, and they'll always come back to hear more.

Re:Catastrophe?

[ackthpt]

For the same reason that the media loves to use the word pandemic at every opportunity. How many people actually died from SARs or Bird Flu? Compare that to how many die on the highway every single day. Scare people, and they'll always come back to hear more.

More than all these and others, the media loves the comparison like a war zone Perhaps the media are behind the increase in conflict linked to global warming - so they can use those words more often.

Re:Catastrophe?

[JTsyo]

Just Atlantis

Re:Catastrophe?

[bmk67]

How many mega-cities were right by the seashore during those previous times?

Those mega-cities right by the seashore are going to have to deal with rising sea levels, whether or not AGW is sound, whether or not anyone does anything about it - because there IS warming in our future, and there will be rising seas.

It's simply a matter of when, not if.

We're so fucking stuck on the fight over the causes of climate change that we're not adequately looking at the questions we should be: what are we going to do when sea levels change?

Because they will.

Re:Catastrophe?

[I'm New Around Here]

Yes, the natural place for that carbon is buried underground. That's where it has always been, since the earth formed five billions years ago.

Re:Catastrophe?

[khallow]

Heh,and it'll be good when plants have finished burying all that evil carbon that got loose.

Also, all that carbon was sequestered in stars until one or more stars went supernova. So we're probably risking a supernova until we can get it all back into the ground again.

Re:Catastrophe?

[khallow]

How many mega-cities were right by the seashore during those previous times?

Too bad we can't move those cities even an inch. I guess they'll just have to hold their breath.

Re:Catastrophe?

[Livius]

Yes, the Earth will adapt.

A particular human civilization may or may not adapt.

Re:Catastrophe?

[perceptual.cyclotron]

The Earth will certainly adapt. It will even have a rich, healthy, and diverse biosphere. Whether or not humans will adapt is much less certain. While it's absolutely true that the Earth has undergone myriad and very dramatic climatic and atmospheric changes, it is worth reminding ourselves that something like 99.9% of species that have ever existed are now extinct, and that our own species is pretty young and not very hardy.

To say that change is the default mode for the Earth should offer us little comfort...

Re:Catastrophe?

[bill_mcgonigle]

How many mega-cities were right by the seashore during those previous times?

And that's the crux of the problem - the wealthy landowners on the water want everybody else to pay to modify the Earth so they don't lose their investment. In the 70's my friend dug a basement 20 miles inland and 30' above sea level and found sea shells about 10 feet down. That the oceans rise and fall is news to nobody. Personally, I had the sense to buy property beyond the wave zone of an oceanic comet strike.

Re:Catastrophe?

[icebike]

Of what potential? No one has even characterized the degree of sea bed warming, it is currently just a theory, but you phrase it as if it is measured and predictable!

Actually your own source mentions mostly deep sea die offs due to anoxia (allegedly), due to a change in circulation patterns. It give only a speculative nod to methane.

However, they walk away from any conclusion with:

The deep-sea extinctions are difficult to explain, as many were regional in extent. General hypotheses such as a temperature-related reduction in oxygen availability, or increased corrosion due to carbonate undersaturated deep waters, are insufficient as explanations.

Then it follows with this statement:

Contrarily, planktonic foraminifera diversified, and dinoflagellates bloomed. Success was also enjoyed by the mammals, who radiated profusely around this time.

Re:Catastrophe?

[riverat1]

Well, I used the term seabed because I was following your lead. It has more to do with the warming of ocean water itself which can be caused by any number of things.

Methane releases under water can lead to anoxia as much of the methane will oxidize before it reaches the surface unless it starts our shallow to begin with (1 CH4 + 2 O2 ==> 1 CO2 + 2 H2O).

The PETM is not especially well understood but it appears to be the closest analog to what is happening now in the prehistorical record. Even then the warming happened over a period of around 20,000 years rather than the several centuries we are on track to do now. There is no doubt it caused a lot of changes to life on Earth just like our current situation will. How bad it will be for human civilization remains to be seen but at the least it's bound to be expensive.

Re:Catastrophe?

[david_thornley]

A pandemic is an infectious disease that fairly quickly affects a large part of the world. Lethality is not part of the definition. The last flu pandemic wasn't all that dangerous, as it turned out, but it still was a pandemic.

Re:Catastrophe?

[Seumas]

You need scare tactics to keep the carbon-credit-market scam going.

Re:Catastrophe?

[dcw3]

Thanks for quoting the definition...sheesh. The fact of the matter is that it still puts fear into the masses, which is the point of my post.

Re:Catastrophe?

[UnknowingFool]

The ice caps have been melting for the last 10,000 years or so. The caps use to be 5,000 feet thick over what is now Chicago. What caused those to start melting, humans? I think not.

You missed the whole point. Species all over the world have gone extinct before humans. That means that humans can kill off species without any consequence?

Why do AGW people always use the end of the little ice age as the starting point of temperature climb? This was an uncharacteristically low period of temperature. Perhaps current temps are a return to normal from that low???

Um because that is when humans started to affect climate? That's like saying why do historians only consider the Dark Ages as after the 6th century. You know after the Roman Empire fell.

Understanding what is normal or possible for the planet as a whole is sounds advice.

Missed the point again.

Sounds like a lot of methane.

[mrjb]

Anyone got a match?

Fragile...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not a whole lot keeping us going venus and dying out. Or going mars and dying out...

But thinking about doing anything to keep us in this nice safe area is expensive. So.. We're not gonna do anything about anything until it's too late.

You future people are fucked...

Re:Fragile...

[riverat1]

There's more than you think. In the first place the Earth has a strong magnetosphere that Venus and Mars lack. It protects the atmosphere from erosion by the solar wind and reduces the effects of cosmic rays. That's what happened on Mars and Venus lost its water because of it. Going Venus is perhaps a little more likely but as others have pointed out we've had CO2 levels in the 4,000-5,000 ppm range before and it didn't happen. Of course the Sun was a bit cooler back then but only a fet percent. It just doesn't seem likely that we could reach the point the feedbacks take us on a path toward Venus-like conditions.

Re:My experience

[ackthpt]

Cue bean eating scene from Blazing Saddles.

How 'bout some more beans, Mr. Taggart?

Taggart: [fans his hat in the air] I'd say you've had enough!

Nature lets one rip

[Anonymous Coward]

and gives evolution another chance.

Not scared but...

[Anonymous Coward]

All I know is we are hitting record temperatures here (highest ever recorded) and each year after year has the highest average temperature recorded previously.

I don't care if it's natural or not. We subdued nature when we got rid of our local predators, when we domesticated animals, when we cut down forests to grow more food, when we drilled tunnels through mountains, when we made diseases extinct through vaccinations... Modifying nature for our benefit is and has been our business since the first civilizations.

This needs to be contained. The cost is too damn high if we don't.

Seems like a resource, not a threat

[Old VMS Junkie]

Seems to me we should be figuring out how to tap into this stuff and use it for fuel.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[BillCable]

There are many groups trying to figure out how to harvest methane hydrate. So far it's been an impossible problem to solve - mostly due to the resource being ridiculously deep in the ocean. The cost to extract exceeds the value of the fuel.

But then that used to be the case with all the natural gas we're now recovering through fracking. All we need is a disruptive innovation and that methane will be viable. There's billions to be made... and lots of hard-working scientists working on making it reality.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[baKanale]

From what I understand methane is a more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so if one believes that the methane is going to enter the atmosphere anyway then it would make sense to convert as much of it it to carbon dioxide first, with the obvious benefit of energy extraction.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[phantomfive]

You're not the only one. In fact, the Japanese are doing exactly that. May be available within 5 years.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[GameboyRMH]

True. If it can replace other forms of fossil fuel that have no chance of causing sudden uncontrollable climate catastrophes (like super-filthy coal, ideally), it might be a good idea to burn it even if we're not too sure about the odds of a "methane bomb." No chance of methane bomb + energy that's the same or less dirty = win-win.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[HiThere]

The problem is that methyl-cathlates are tender. A shock (like a drill, perhaps) can cause them to destabilze into methane and water...and the shock of that can propagate.

One reason this resource hasn't been tapped previously is that the people who looked into it decided it was too dangerous for the potential payoff.

Re:Seems like a resource, not a threat

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Good idea! And then we can work out how to generate electricity using forest fires.

The recommended procedure for the clathrate gun going off is "put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye".

Thinking outside the box

[Provocateur]

Instead of the Arctic, let's work with the Antarctic, to get opposite results. Less methane, and more good news all round., leaving the cows to rejoice at still being Number One methane producer.

Re:Thinking outside the box

[manu0601]

You want to raise cattle in Antartic once global warming will have melt it?

You shouldn't

[redmid17]

If it happens, there is not much you can do about it.

Not a crisis!

[sjames]

This is no crisis, it's an opportunity! I vote we send the entire TSA to the arctic right now with orders to pat the polar bears down for arctic methane bombs! We'll get those terrorists this time!

Re:Not a crisis!

[Aighearach]

Grandpa, tell us the story again, about why you hate polar bears?

Re:Not a crisis!

[sjames]

On the contrary, I have faith that they'll do the right thing just by acting natural.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[mcgrew]

Could you give a citation for that "lowered solar output?" Because wikipedia disagrees with you. Do you work for an oil company or have you just succumbed to their propaganda?

As to should we worry, no. Worrying never solved anything. Worry isn't needed, planning is.

You can worry about global cooling in five or ten thousand years.

Re:Things I AM worried about

[sinij]

1. Reasonable, you are on /. instead of working and you know they are logging it (unless you are sysadmin with direct access to logs)
2. It will inevitably go up as you age.
3. Very likely, but if this affects you so much you are ether driving decades-old car (and realize savings from not buying a newcar) or you over-spent on something and now living paycheck-to-paycheck with no margin or savings for raising costs
4. There is very little reason to suspect that on-going decline of Detroit will reverse. Things will keep getting worse (and your taxes will keep going up).

Now get back to worrying about methane bombs!

Doesn't seem likely but

[apcullen]

Given consequences as grave as those predicted, it seems like this should be looked at very closely, despite the skepticism of prominent scientists.

Law of Headlines

[neminem]

According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, this is a question, so the answer is "no". I'm not sure how well that works, though...

(Though my favorite unexpected use of that "law" was a thread a few months back titled something like "Will your computer run Crysis 3?")

Re:Law of Headlines

[vlueboy]

Thanks, that was intersting
A slashdot search (wow, didn't have to resort to google!) showed that is here: But Can It Run Crysis 3?

Since Betterigde is mentioned so much, I'll share what I found on Yammer (a social network I haven't heard of here): 5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click

There are various headline types, and they "resonate better". Pasting their reasons (go to article to see numbers and stuff):
Explosion in content competing for readers' attention
80% of readers never make it past the headline
Traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline

What's new is that they break things down:

We determined there to be five high-level headline types

        Normal (Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
        Question (What are Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful?)
        How to (How to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
        Number (30 Ways To Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
        Reader-Addressing (Ways You Need to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)

I've seen lots of headlines for 2sleep and other trollish headline sites (or ads), which use and abuse those, plus enticing pictures that may or may not have anything to do with the content. Compared to them slashdot is seriously restrained and honext in its journalism.

Been there

[puddingebola]

Just had one after lunch. Pew.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

As are alarmists. I only believe in trolls, and you've proven my point.

Just had a thought, a worrying one

[Palamos]

Now what would happen if a stream of methane developed which was ignited by, say, a lightening strike, there would be a rapidly growing forward feedback loop which would release more methane and generate more heat, and more methane, etc. How much oxygen would this methane use up and how much heat would be dumped into the atmosphere? Would this be shrugged off by the earth or would it spell a species killing catastrophe?

Re:Just had a thought, a worrying one

[camperdave]

Now what would happen if a stream of methane developed which was ignited by, say, a lightening strike, there would be a rapidly growing forward feedback loop which would release more methane and generate more heat, and more methane, etc.

Possible, but unlikely. Surface fires, especially something short lived like a gas burnoff, would not have a great effect on subsurface temperatures.

How much oxygen would this methane use up

Two oxygen molecules for each methane molecule assuming complete and pure combustion.

and how much heat would be dumped into the atmosphere?

About 891 kJ/mol.

Would this be shrugged off by the earth

Yes.

or would it spell a species killing catastrophe?

I'm fairly sure some of the local species would be done for, but would it be an extinction level event? Doubt it.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[camperdave]

The Earth *IS* the center of the universe, just like everywhere else is.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jeffmeden]

Mind you, not sure where this seabed warming is supposed to come from, with Global cooling (due to lower Solar output. . . .)

And temperatures during the Medieval Optimum were even higher that the peak of the current warming, and no sudden volatilization of Methane Clathrates. . .

Agreed: nothing to see here. . .

An awful low UID for such a silly post... The current warming is indeed beyond the Medieval Optimum by a significant margin, and Solar output is at a pretty high level (we are at the middle of the current output cycle). Are you trying to troll, or are you literally drowning in Kool Aid and this is the best you could type as you choked for air?

Economic Bonanza

[sunsurfandsand]

Suppose the $60T estimate is right. Isn't that good? In a closed economy, income equals expenditure. Earth, for now, is a closed economy. Therefore, if we spend $60T on goods and services to deal with methane, then we will have $60T in income.

Re:Economic Bonanza

[ceoyoyo]

Except I'd rather spend my $80T on electronic gizmos, food and shelter instead of $20T on those things and $60T helping you losers who insist on living on flood plains move to higher ground.

Re:Economic Bonanza

[phantomfive]

Not really, because then after all that expense, all we have is exactly what we had before. If we're going to spend that money, I'd rather spend it on blackjack. Or the betterment of mankind.

It's not like we're going to get free money. We're going to have to divert resources from other things to take care of this.

Re:Economic Bonanza

[B1oodAnge1]

No, that's not how value works. In this hypothetical you would end up with 60 trillion dollars that are worth less than they were before. There's no such thing as a closed economy in the sense of a fixed amount of value. Total value always fluctuates.

Re:Economic Bonanza

[Colonel Korn]

Suppose the $60T estimate is right. Isn't that good? In a closed economy, income equals expenditure. Earth, for now, is a closed economy. Therefore, if we spend $60T on goods and services to deal with methane, then we will have $60T in income.

That's the Broken Window Fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy). However, if you believe that the majority of the world's endeavors are currently without value, then uniting the world behind a massive response to this sort of global change may be comparatively better, which points out one of the holes in the BWF.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anon-Admin]

Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

(And just so you dont have to read that long complicated article here is a link to a nice picture)
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif

But don't let real science get in the way of your research via Wikipedia.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[BillCable]

Don't go confusing everyone with science!!

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[BillCable]

But if it's on the Internet it has to be true.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anon-Admin]

Unless you are yelling FIRE because you see someone light a bic lighter.

  Based on your projection that it could start a fire and burn the building down.

If you would like we could build a computer simulation as to what would happen if the building was to burn from the bic lighter along with projected death rates and evaluations of proper suppression systems as a feedback.

don't worry about it

[stenvar]

There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.

Compared to that basic fact, the fact that these predictions are pure guesswork based on many untested assumptions doesn't even matter that much.

Re:don't worry about it

[B1oodAnge1]

This. Apart from the totalitarian world government you mention (and there's honestly no guarantee even that would work), there is no way to significantly alter the rate of consumption of fossil fuels, let alone stop it.
If you truly believe that catastrophic warming is going to happen then the only rational response is preparation, not prevention.

Re:don't worry about it

[AdamHaun]

There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.

How come all the global warming "skeptics" are never skeptical of this kind of economic/political strawman argument? Every helpful government program or regulatory regime ever made has generated far more predictions of doom and gloom than environmental catastrophes. Weren't the Clean Air Act (1963) and Clean Water Act (1972) supposed to destroy the economy too? Wasn't Medicare (1965) supposed to bring about a socialist dictatorship? Wasn't the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) supposed to shutter ever small business in the country? None of that stuff ever happens, but it's always taken for granted that this time is different, this time the economy really *will* be destroyed, you'll see! There is no way that fighting global warming requires a "totalitarian worldwide government", either, any more than fighting ozone depletion did. Of course, no one is actually proposing any such thing, but constantly repeating it has sure convinced a lot of Slashdotters.

How come all the people who are terrified of the "massive" cost of a carbon tax (that they can't quantify) shrug off the idea of having to relocate most of our agriculture and the populations of many major cities? Not to mention conflict caused by mass migration? Or even the general air pollution caused by fossil fuels that results in respiratory problems for millions of people? I guess those are other people's problems.

Finally, how come all the people who have the utmost faith in technology's ability to help us cope with climate change never consider that maybe technology could help us cope with higher carbon prices too? It's not like the price of natural resources has never risen before.

Re:don't worry about it

[stenvar]

How come all the people who are terrified of the "massive" cost of a carbon tax (that they can't quantify)

A carbon tax is laughably ineffective. If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether. You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.

shrug off the idea of having to relocate most of our agriculture and the populations of many major cities?

Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia. Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it. There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.

Finally, how come all the people who have the utmost faith in technology's ability to help us cope with climate change never consider that maybe technology could help us cope with higher carbon prices too? It's not like the price of natural resources has never risen before.

I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.

Re:don't worry about it

[AdamHaun]

A carbon tax is laughably ineffective.

You know this how?

If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether.

No, you don't, and reductions don't have to happen instantly. A fairly rapid reduction to (picking an arbitrary target) pre-1980s levels could be followed by a lengthier reduction to (also arbitrary) pre-1900 levels, etc. The sooner we start, the more gradual the change can be. The Earth can absorb some CO2 emissions, so we don't ever need to go all the way to zero.

You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.

Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.

Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia.

Miami begs to disagree. We will have infrastructure problems long before any cities are underwater. Miami is an extreme case, but more typical cases certainly will not take centuries, let alone millennia.

Also, climate change isn't the only environmental problem we have. There's the aforementioned air pollution, as well as increasing demands on fresh water supplies, rising oil prices, etc. Resource shortages tend to cause very expensive problems which are very expensive to fix. We need to be addressing these issues now, not waiting around to see just how bad the damage will be.

Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it.

Sure they were (and are). Massive environmental change means food shortages, especially when you're a peasant farmer with no trucks or airplanes to transport you far away. We just don't care that much about people that starved to death 500 years ago. Not as many people die today because we spend lots of money to keep them alive through droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.

There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.

This is only true if the changes take place on a time scale much longer than a human lifetime. Otherwise, a lot of people end up with property they can't sell. And moving property lines by fiat takes exactly the sort of totalitarian government that we don't want.

I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.

There are two problems with this. The first is that many, many people are already being hurt by ongoing pollution, and the second is that natural processes have their own timetable. So far market-driven change has proved elusive. It is quite possible for government intervention to advance the state of an art, as it regularly does with military technology. Again, this is a situation where the predicted economic doom and gloom never seems to materialize.

Re:don't worry about it

[stenvar]

No, you don't, and reductions don't have to happen instantly. A fairly rapid reduction to (picking an arbitrary target) pre-1980s levels could be followed by a lengthier reduction to (also arbitrary) pre-1900 levels, etc.

Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?

The sooner we start, the more gradual the change can be. The Earth can absorb some CO2 emissions, so we don't ever need to go all the way to zero.

Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels. And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.

Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.

You just did: you proposed reductions to 1980's and pre-1900 levels and implied that we could do that without a massive reduction in our standard of living.

Miami begs to disagree. We will have infrastructure problems long before any cities are underwater.

Miami is built in a location where it is prone to certain natural disasters. When people choose to move there, that's what they choose to live with. There is some risk of natural disasters where I live (not climate related), and that's what I have to accept.

Also, climate change isn't the only environmental problem we have.

We're talking about climate change here, not other environmental issues. I am not against environmental laws in principle, I'm against ill-conceived and ineffective environmental laws, and carbon taxes and other climate-change related regulations fall into that category.

Otherwise, a lot of people end up with property they can't sell.

If you live in Miami and you firmly believe that climate change is a big problem, you can sell your property right now with hardly a loss. Except for the housing bubble, the long-term trend for real-estate in Miami is still up.

And moving property lines by fiat takes exactly the sort of totalitarian government that we don't want.

If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses. Government intervention or "fiat" simply is not required at all.

The first is that many, many people are already being hurt by ongoing pollution,

Why do you keep babbling on about "pollution"? We're talking about climate change here, not any other form of environmental protection.

and the second is that natural processes have their own timetable

Yes, and their timetable is very slow.

So far market-driven change has proved elusive.

Not at all. The US could easily cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half without any risk by building modern nuclear power plants. Solar and wind have made great progress due mostly to technologies developed by the private sector unrelated to government programs.

It is quite possible for government intervention to advance the state of an art, as it regularly does with military technology. Again, this is a situation where the predicted economic doom and gloom

Re:don't worry about it

[AdamHaun]

Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?

You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled. Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?) I haven't been to the Dominican Republic, but American standards of living in 1980 were far from third world, even by today's standards. As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.

Here's average CO2 emissions in tons per capita for each of the G7 nations (plus Australia for fun) in 2006, the last year before the financial crisis:

Nation CO2 GDP
U.S. 18.8 44623
U.K. 9.1 40481
Canada 16.8 39250
Australia 18 35992
France 5.9 35457
Germany 9.9 35238
Japan 9.7 34102
Italy 7.9 31777
[Slashdot formatting sucks :-( ]

If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia). But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower. France and Germany have nearly indistinguishable GDP/capita but France's emissions are 40% lower. (They have similar population sizes and are right next to each other, too!) Australia has 20% lower GDP than the U.S. despite having similar emissions. None of these countries are bad places to live. If you look at the full list you'll see some of low- to mid-tier countries in the top 20, and some nice developed nations further down.

On top of that, you have the complicating factor of wealth distribution in the U.S., so while GDP per capita has gone up, income per capita for most of the population hasn't. That's mostly an orthogonal issue, but also has a big effect on standard of living.

Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels.

We could impose limits through regulation or ramp up a carbon tax over time, but the methods for reducing fossil fuel dependence are left to the private sector, just like they are with e.g. car mileage standards. Governments should set and enforce the goals, but stay out of the details.

And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.

North America and Europe account for a third of world CO2 emissions. Making a big cut in that would be a big start, at the very least. Also, the U.S. and Europe are best equipped to develop sustainable technology, so the rest of the world can ride along on our coattails as we figure things out.

If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses.

Calculable risk might increase graduall

Re:don't worry about it

[stenvar]

You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. [...] If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia).

So, in different words, the correlation I assume exists even such a simplistic analysis.

CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled.

Imagine that. And all that without any kind of effective government regulation or intervention. Yet, you claim that the market alone is incapable of solving these problems.

Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?)

What do you think computers are powered by?

As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.

Your industry makes one of the most energy-intensive products ever created. The carbon emissions that go into a wafer aren't just for the chip itself, it's for all the machinery needed to create it, the people needed to support that, the mining and extraction for all the rare elements used in the creation of the chips and the machinery, etc. The reason you don't see most of the destruction your industry wreaks on the environment is that most of the dirty and ugly stuff has been outsourced to overseas, so you can wallow in the illusion that you create a clean, environmentally friendly product.

Here's average CO2 emissions in tons per capita [wikipedia.org] for each of the G7 nations (plus Australia for fun) in 2006, the last year before the financial crisis: [...] But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower.

Well, and that's where such simplistic analyses break down: the US has a lot more energy-intensive industries, while the UK (and much of the rest of Europe) simply exports their carbon emissions to China and other nations. A per-nation analysis ultimately isn't a valid analysis. I simply gave nations as an illustration of the orders of magnitude we are talking about.

The burden of proof is on you that the policies you advocate are effective, won't harm the economy, and will actually be more effective than letting the market take care of the problem. Until you do, nobody in their right mind should support any kind of climate change legislation, carbon tax, etc.

Instead, what we do know is (you observed it yourself) that without any kind of government intervention, industries naturally become more energy efficient and less carbon intensive.

Re:don't worry about it

[Magius_AR]

Wasn't Medicare (1965) supposed to bring about a socialist dictatorship?

Isn't it? Medicare/Medicaid accounts for ~21% of our total government spending so far, and that's not counting Obamacare, which was created to address deficiencies in the existing programs. Tack that on and it boosts our total annual govt spending on healthcare to about ~26% of all our tax dollars. At what point of government control does the healthcare industry become a socialist dictatorship? Feels like one to me (and my paycheck).

Re:don't worry about it

[Magius_AR]

You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.

Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.

Not true. The US has made great strides in CO2 (we're at like 1990s levels right now), but the green movement would have you believe we've done nothing. In addition, the vehicle that has led the charge to lower CO2 output (natural gas conversion + fracking) they're trying their best to squash at every opportunity. Therefore, I disagree with your claim that "baby steps" is an acceptable measure for global warming alarmists. They want damn near full and rapid conversion to solar (or other renewables), and will accept little else.

Dr. Strangelove to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

Seriously though, the Arctic methane "bomb" is one of the less likely scenarios to bring about an apocalypse. See also: Yellowstone Caldera eruption (blankets most of North America in ash, triggers another global ice age), Siberian Traps (mass extinction event, again), or any one of several volcanoes in Iceland (sulfuric acid haze slowly destroying your lungs, anyone?).

Re:Dr. Strangelove to the rescue

[JTsyo]

Maybe the Yellowstone Caldera and Arctic methane will cancel each other out. Things will be great, other than for those in NA.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Shatrat]

If it's on nasa.gov that's a pretty good start.

the answer is Bean-O

[ClassicASP]

beano prevents gas. we're gonna need a lot of it

Re:Things I AM worried about

[Anon-Admin]

2. Is my health insurance premium going to go through the roof.

My company just announced a 20% increase in health insurance premiums. Seems Obama care is kicking in and it is going to cost us more (Managements explanation)

So, yes it is going through the roof.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[Black Parrot]

Global warming my ass. It's fucking cold and raining here in Wyoming.

If a cool spell disproves global warming, does a warm spell prove it? Or do you prefer to focus on the details that you think support your beliefs?

Ask people who spent June in Phoenix or Las Vegas how they liked the weather this year.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jbolden]

There is no 15 year pause in global warming.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anon-Admin]

Then I am a french model.

Now it must be true.

Worry - not as much as some other problems

[Silvrmane]

I'd be worried more about all the methane leaking from drilling and fracking sites... just saying.

Armageddon

[Shempster]

Political rhetoric aside, if there is a shred of truth to this possible methane bomb event, then humanity is too stupid, and unable to hit the brakes. You wind up with theories on how can human civilization possibly make the type of significant global changes to its daily operation that might mitigate the damage? Drastically cut the population via conventional weapons or some bio-engineered attack on humanity? Jam the majority of human population into giant bio-domed metropolises? (nah, that's sci-fi fantasy). I'm leaning more on mass-extinction level event that accelerates on top of the existing mass-extinction event already in progress, that wipes out everything except maybe cockroaches. Jesus isn't going to save us from our stupidity. Either way, its a possible type of armageddon, no matter what you believe.

Re:Really dumb alarmist nonsense

[gmuslera]

What are the odds of all those events? Anyway, I wonder why in a country where so many people bet a lot of money in games where odds against them are astronomical are so easily convinced that the high odds of this aren't worth worrying about. But i suppose that should be a normal human bias to only fear the spectacular with very improbable odds over the boring that are almost certain to happen (and that you could do something to avoid them in a lot of cases)

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Black Parrot]

You may be interested in this.

After enjoying the review of the creationist tactic of combating science by means of a letter signed by mostly non-experts, scroll down to the plot and consider it carefully. Notice anything?

OTOH, the link contains facts, which may cause you irreparable harm if you click it.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia disagrees with you.

Are you fucking kidding? Wikipedia? The "source" that any jackass can edit and put in anything he wants?

It's time

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you need to know about the end of the world you can see from hiking slot-canyons in southern Utah. You'll notice the rocks are composed of layers; 0.3 meters of red sandstone and then a thin layer of black, then the next 0.3 meters of sandstone and another layer of black. Poke at the layer of black and it's clearly a layer of carbon-based stuff.

Then notice there is a 0.3 meter layer of sandstone sitting just below the surface layer of sagebrush. Clearly it's time. We are the next black layer in the sandstone.

Re:Things I AM worried about

[danceswithtrees]

I completely understand your prioritization of concerns and worries. But I sometimes wonder whether the humans on earth will end like bacteria growing on a Petri dish. You grow bacteria on a plate and at first, things are great-- more resources than bacteria, so no worries and gangbuster (exponential) growth. As the population density increases, competition grows for nutrients so growth starts slowing. Perhaps some bacteria do better than others. Allow me to anthropomorphize the little buggers and lets say they worry about the amount of space they have, how much food they have, how many kids to have, commute time (some bacteria are motile), etc. Meanwhile the finite nutrients and space are disappearing and toxic waste products are building up. The outcome is inevitable-- nutrients and space run out after a couple of days and then the bacteria die.

For eons, life on earth was in a steady state because survival was hard and limited by food and other resources as well as predation. People and organisms had to spend a lot of time and effort to get enough to feed themselves and their offspring. Now you can take $4 to the local 7-11 and buy more calories than are good for you. The population of humans have been growing nearly exponentially for several thousand years. We worry about the daily things in life as you mentioned and this is totally logical. But I wonder if we humans are headed to the same inevitable end as the bacteria. Instead of a Petri dish, we are on earth and instead of playing out over a couple of days, our tragedy takes a couple thousand years.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you say so eh?

Have you not been paying attention for the last six months? The AGW establishment has admitted the pause and are scrambling to find the reason.

In related news

[gmuslera]

the FBI raided MotherJones offices because they were talking about some dangerous new kind of bomb, confiscating a pressure cooker from there as evidence.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[Time_Ngler]

Damn straight! I've had it up to here with these so called scientists. If it's not hot out, right now, in the exact location where you live, we can all put this global warming fear mongering to bed!

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[I'm just joshin]

So far this summer has been nice. We had a few really hot days, but fewer than normal. We didn't get enough rain from our "monsoon," but that's what I say almost every year. It's going to be somewhere between 103F and 107F today which is on the low side of normal.

And looking at our electrical use for the summer, it's about 15% lower than last year which means our A/C units haven't been running as hard.

But go ahead and hype how hot it has been here, especially to anyone in California. We like that, it helps keep more Californians from moving here.

-J

What's DHS doing about this?

[qwijibo]

Why haven't we heard about this from the Department of Homeland Security? What are they hiding?

It's just a matter of time before al queda gets its hand on this methane bomb. $60 trillion is just the kind of impact they'd like to unleash on us heathens and infidels.

Re:What's DHS doing about this?

[Kaenneth]

Why haven't we heard about this from the Department of Homeland Security? What are they hiding?

It's just a matter of time before al queda gets its hand on this methane bomb. $60 trillion is just the kind of impact they'd like to unleash on us heathens and infidels.

Why do you think the Middle East exports so much oil?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Right now the fire is something akin to what is happening in California.

Ok, where and what are these effects we're supposed to be seeing? Haven't you ever heard of confirmation bias?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[BillCable]

I was attempting to reference Anon's Wikipedia quip... apparently unsuccessfully...

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

The current warming is indeed beyond the Medieval Optimum by a significant margin

Where is the evidence for this claim? Need I remind you that no one has actually measured temperatures directly during the Medieval Optimum?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[GameboyRMH]

The "15-year pause" in global warming is bunk:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard of confirmation bias and I STRONGLY AGREE with it.

Re:What about a "15 year pause" would worry us?

[khallow]

A "15 year pause" has nothing to worry us realists because it doesn't matter if you find a trend that is zero.

Go ahead. Knock yourself out finding as many as you like.

What you have to do is prove that the trend is different from the predictions we've made of 0.16C per decade.

If the trend is zero, then it is different from 0.16 C per decade. That wouldn't threaten realists.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[drfred79]

Count me in as a Randian zealot. I pray to Adam Smith to smite my socialist foes. Anyway, appeal to authority arguments have been debunked. Its 99% of respondent scientists in a ten year old survey. Global Cooling first. Then Peak Oil. Then it was Global Warming. Then it was Anthropomorphic Climate Change. Carbon PPM Quantity Tipping points. Fracking Earthquakes. Methane Bombs. It'd be a lot easier to believe all these sounding of alarms if they ever led to different conclusions. They usually end up with the same prognosis: More government oversight over personal freedom, reduced economic output, central planning, Al Gore. I categorically disagree with all the solutions. The fact is that the climate changes and there is no optimal global temperature or level of Co2 or ice percentage. These are arbitrary measurements and a lot more characteristic of Flat Earthers (KEEP THE EARTH THE SAME TEMPERATURE AS THE PAST!) than people who are Global Warming Skeptics.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you ever heard of confirmation bias?

Someone that disagrees with you seeing predicted results: CONFIRMATION BIAS! You seeing non-predicted results: SEE? YOUR PREDICTIONS ARE WORTHLESS!

Do you see the hypocrisy?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[drfred79]

In 2006 the United Nations projected that the Midway and other low elevation islands would be completely under water. Since you say that we are seeing the effects of a fire (not sure which one you allude to?) could you tell me the humanitarian efforts being put into place to rescue all these Global warming refugees.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I live just outside Vancouver British Columbia Canada, and I own a convertible. I have not had the top up in 5 weeks
If the current weather is caused by global warming, then I say BRING IT ON!

Not at all...

[Lumpy]

I have my bug out needs all in order, Looking forward to the collapse and the resulting thunderdome.
Welcome to the new age!

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[AlienSexist]

And of course the solution will be some sort of taxation system.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

weird how anyone even slightly disagreeing with their view is a "denier" and "works for an oil company".

Irrelevant data

[Geoffrey.landis]

Could you give a citation for that "lowered solar output?" Because wikipedia disagrees with you.

Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
(And just so you dont have to read that long complicated article here is a link to a nice picture)
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif

That is a graph of sunspot number. The question was about "lowered solar output."

This is amazingly typical of internet arguments, especially by the greenhouse-effect denying community. When asked to show data supporting their assertion, they show something else entirely, but since it's a graph with numbers and such, it looks scientific. It's a win-win argument for the deniers: readers who aren't familar with the field say "oh, they have data: they must be right." And for people who do understand that the data is irrelevant, in the worst case, it sidetracks the argument onto a completely irrelevant discussion of what the connection between sunspot number is to solar output.

This data addresses your argument.

Re:Irrelevant data

[milkmage]

so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.

curiously, an inverse relationship (fewer sunspots = cooler earth)

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the "Little Ice Age" when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

Re:Irrelevant data

[Plumpaquatsch]

so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.

curiously, an inverse relationship (fewer sunspots = cooler earth)

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the "Little Ice Age" when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

Oddly enough, the maximum number of sunspots per cycle has lowered since the 60s, yet temperatures are still on the rise. Showing that man made warming is stronger than "sunspot cooling".

Re:Irrelevant data

[Optali]

Hey, that seems cool!
We had a Little Ice Age here too a few months ago: It was cold and snowed!
Some elderly people complained saying that in the past this was called "Winter". But hey, the proof is there: The climate change is not happening because there are sunspots and we have these little ice ages every time. I even found ice in my fridge mate... and beer, tons of hte stuff!! Really, you have to believe me!!

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[JTsyo]

Wait does this mean the lack of sunspots in 2008 lead to the market crash? Quick someone overlay the business cycles and sunspots. Think I found a way to beat the market.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jbolden]

Your weather may get quite a bit better. There is a good argument to be made that there are huge land masses which will benefit from warmer weather. But that's a different argument than warming isn't happening.

Re:But there is one because YOU say so, eh?

[drfred79]

Ah, there is your problem. You believe everything you learn in school. How are those sophomore feminist basket weaving classes going for you? Pretty hard? Math is hard. Sometimes data and trends are interrupted or reversed by events outside of models. Then you create a new model to try and predict the new normal. You don't keep trying to force the new round peg into the old square hole.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Meeni]

Would you care to substantiate your claim? Data show no such thing as a 15 year pause in global warming. They show it is accelerating.

Revenge of the Mammoths

[AlienSexist]

They bottled up their flatulence within their ancient graveyards to one day reap revenge on the Hominids that hunted them.

Re:Something will have to give

[B1oodAnge1]

What if as population and energy increase so does our ability and willingness (due to cost effectiveness) to attain resources (including shelter) from more and more expensive sources? You know, like it has throughout history. The Malthusian Scissors don't exist.

Re:Something will have to give

[B1oodAnge1]

should read energy *requirements*

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[h4rr4r]

Claims like that need some citations before anyone will take them seriously.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[AliasMarlowe]

Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
But don't let real science get in the way of your research via Wikipedia.

And don't let real science get in the way of your misconceptions, either. The nature of the link between solar cycles and climate is largely unknown, and is a topic of ongoing research (as you would have gleaned by actually reading the article you linked to). Variation in solar output is a bit more complex than merely noting the range of sunspot numbers or coverage of the solar disk over a cycle. The total output varies by less than 0.1% over a cycle, but its spectral content also varies.

If one were to give your "theory" any credence, then the world must have been cooling for the last half century, as solar cycle 19 was more intense than any since then. FYI, here are the butterfly diagrams for the last century or so of solar cycles.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[h4rr4r]

A real randian would not like adam smith very much.

I am going to guess you have read neither.

You think oil production has not peaked?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[interval1066]

You can worry about global cooling in five or ten thousand years.

Much like the world did when I was back in highschool in the 70's.

Re:Something will have to give

[rrohbeck]

Efficiency improvements have never been able to compensate for growth. They aren't even today in the US. All reduction in energy consumption was due to the recession, as the recent record numbers for oil consumption show.

Malthus was only delayed by the fossil fuel bonanza which is coming to an end.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

[Gumpu]

I'm 45 now, and since I started watching the news around 10 or so, I've heard news stories about the world about to come to end it for various reasons: nuclear bombs, acid rain, over population, full shortage, pollution,.... so far it is still spinning.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[Mike Van Pelt]

A cool spell doesn't disprove global warming, but at every heat wave, there's a chorus of OMGCO2WEREALLGONNADIE!!! so an occasional "I went camping last weekend, in California, in August, and nearly froze my tucchis off" (true, by the way) scoffing isn't any more out of line.

Yes, weather isn't climate. We all know that.

Me, I've been campaigning to go full speed ahead replacing coal with nukes for over 30 years. The same folks (for the most part) who are the very loudest at the OMGCO2WEREALLGONNADIE!!! crap are also the very loudest at the OMGRADIATIONWEREALLGONNADIE!!!! scare-mongering.

Arithmetic deniers. The options in the near term (several decades) are: 1) Coal. 2) Nuclear. 3) Collapse of industrial/technological civilzation and very rapid very drastic population drop (i.e. gigadeath, not attrition).

No, we don't want to be dumping nearly as much CO2 into the air as we do. But we don't want to kill off 80%+ of the Earth's population either. If nothing else, very few of those people will be inclined to go gentle into that good night just because the energy omni-obstructionists say so, and they'll resist with everything they've got, up to and including hydrogen bombs.

To quote Stuart Brand, "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."

Re:Really dumb alarmist nonsense

[JTsyo]

Well if you want to know what the world would look like with the oceans go, try this page: http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[TheCarp]

Sounds like you are in denial...and if you say you aren't that is just confirmation that you are definitely in denial.

Re:Things I AM worried about

[drfred79]

I agree with everything you say. It is absolutely the type of argument I believe your side makes in this bi-polar country. Thank you for conveying your side's argument so clearly.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

And the title of the alleged research is "A decade of weather extremes". Only a decade which is especially unconvincing given that there are no more than about 15 such decades of weather records anywhere in the world. So insufficient data for the claim that is made. This is the sort of tiresome crap you think is evidence.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Do you see the hypocrisy?

In other words, confirmation bias is ok, as long as it's in your favor.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

if you will only believe that witch you can measure directly then you cant even make a modern computer.

Well, I can't make a modern computer either way. So I guess your argument is a waste of your time.

Indirectly measurable effects are still real and sources of data for indirect measurements from sources which are different in nature and seem to match each other (ice cores from different regions tree rings sediment types and see level effects on rocks) should be trusted unless the person questioning them can come up with a valid reason not too

Such as those metrics don't actually measure what you think they are measuring? Do you have any other concerns I can address while we're at it?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[drfred79]

I just want to state how awesome you are. Since you've read all of Ayn Rand's books which one would you say is your favorite? Atlas Shrugged is the trendy choice over the Fountainhead but I can't help but to enjoy it more. Did you prefer Adam Smith's "Of Moral Sentiments" or the classic "Wealth of Nations" more? Even though Smith's opus was Wealth of Nations and outlined his general thesis of economics I prefer Of Moral Sentiments because it better juxtaposed the irrationality of the market through behavioral economics. Just because the current Administration is trying to stifle the production of fossil fuels does not mean we have peaked. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=A Dependent on the whims of the government we could surpass peak oil. New technologies have allowed us to incentivize the mining of prior cost prohibitive oil fields. So my argument is if we have reached peak oil its because of our own constraints not because its physically not there. I'm not even going to argue Ayn Rand not liking Adam Smith. That is trollbait.

Disaster? No. Energy Opportunity? YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of..." methane. If there were 50 gigatons of natural gas under the sea desperately wanting to make itself available to those above land, do you have any idea how much money could be made from that??

50000 megatons of LNG converts to 2,462,894,953,450 MMBtu. 2.46 trillion MMBtu of LNG. Let's assume a 50% recovery efficiency. 1.23 trillion MMBtu. At the current market price of 3.23 USD per MMBtu, that's 3.97 trillion USD to be made.

Is there seriously ANYONE who really believes that 4 trillion USD of energy is just sitting untouched and ignored by the Energy sector? If 4 trillion dollars of LNG was available there, companies would be CLAMORING to gain control of the area, wouldn't they?

Just because someone dreams it up in a computer model is no reason to skip sanity checks on calculations.

Re:Disaster? No. Energy Opportunity? YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot. The Day After Tomorrow will always get modded +5 Insightful Documentary.

Re:Something will have to give

[iggymanz]

the population growth rate derivative is almost to the point (about 2070) where earth's population will begin to shrink.

Water does not mysteriously vanish, there is a cycle and fresh water is trivially distilled (an ideal application for simple solar heating).

There is no shortage of energy on earth, not even of fossil fuels.

Resources such as metals don't disappear, we've done future generation a favor by putting them into form for reuse that is much less energy intensive than mining and refining.

so, no brick wall, no end, just engineering challenges with known solutions.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Then why aren't you trolling Salgak1 for not having evidence?

Because there's plenty of people to challenge his claims. There isn't plenty of people to challenge the conventional wisdom of climate change. Look at the size of the threads replying to his post. The herd is running the other way.

I would give you a link to a very insightful study but you would no doubt dismiss it as commie propaganda.

Why speculate when we can just look at someone who did that? For example, we have this gem who claimed "statistical methods" were used to show that extreme events were more likely than they would in an unchanged environment. A glance at the paper told me everything. The claim was based on a mere ten years of weather data and the authors had no idea what extreme weather should look like in the absence of a "human influence on climate". It has to be Communists!

So it is probably for the best that you didn't challenge me with a link. I might have to look at the abstract and find the glaring flaws in the study again.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[mark-t]

That's all very well and good when there's an actual route of escape.

Dunno if you noticed this or not, but we're kinda stuck here... and barring some extraordinary and unprecedented breakthrough in physics and energy consumption, unfortunately that's not likely to change anytime within the next couple of millennia.

So metaphorically, people who are screaming about global warming are going around yelling "fire" when there's absolutely no possible way that anybody who'se currently inside is getting out of the building anyways. A more prudent exercise than alarming people would be to do whatever you can, personally, to try to mitigate disaster... since going around shouting at people isn't going to accomplish much other than make other people's lives miserable.

Re:Something will have to give

[rrohbeck]

Much of the fresh water used today is fossil water. Desalination uses large amounts of energy, making it a nonstarter except in places like Saudi Arabia (until their oil runs out.)
There is no shortage of energy, just the prices go through the roof. There is enough fossil fuel available to drive CO2 to 1,000 ppmv.
Resources such as phosphorus and potassium are diluted into a unusable form (runoff) by agriculture.

Sunspots [Re:Irrelevant data]

[Geoffrey.landis]

so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.

Correct. The data given as a putative "response" is irrelevant to the question on so many levels it hurts. It doesn't state what the connection between sunspots and solar activity is; it shows the normal 11-year sunspot cycle, not anything different or unusual, and it shows only about one and a half cycles, not enough of a long term time series to even judge whether sunspot number (much less solar output) is going up or down.

So, with respect to the request, "Could you give a citation for that 'lowered solar output?' "-- fail.

But-- as you go on to demonstrate-- it does serve excellently to completely change the subject, and thus does its job of distracting people from noticing that there is no evidence whatsoever for the original assertion by changing the topic to a discussion of the relationship between sunspots and climate.

On that subject, the best data at the moment seems to show that the onset of the "little ice age" cooling was correlated with volcanic eruptions, and hid little or nothing to do with sunspots.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/eruptions-not-quiet-sun-may-have-triggered-little-ice-age/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=volcanoes-may-have-sparked

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[I'm New Around Here]

Then I am a french model.

Do you happen to be dating a ditzy blonde woman who doesn't believe insurance companies have apps for cell phones?

There is no other basket

[Anonymous Coward]

No other planets in our solar system support life. That doesn't leave us a lot of choices. The nearest star is about 40,000 years away with rockets twice as fast as those that exist presently and acceleration to near light speeds would shear the proteins and nucleic acids apart anyway. Perhaps its time to get serious about protecting the one habitable place for humans in the known universe before those who would profits at everyone's expense destroys it.

Re:Analogy

[I'm New Around Here]

I will have less money on hand than if I didn't spend the $30 I used to have.

What is your definition of "poorer", if not "having less money than before"?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[I'm New Around Here]

wikipedia disagrees with you.

Are you fucking kidding? Wikipedia? The "source" that any jackass can edit and put in anything he wants?

I just edited the Wikipedia article on 'Wikipedia', and it states that only authorized experts are allowed to edit Wikipedia articles. So you are now wrong, because Wikipedia says so.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jbolden]

That graph shows a decade where the temperature is beyond anything seen anywhere else on the chart. Way above the level 15 years ago. And certainly way above 50 or 100 years ago. How does that prove your point?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Indirect measurements work well, very well, much of our modern technology relies on them to work at all, so a vast proportion of our society would fail if they where not both reliable and accurate.

Because someone went through the trouble of directly measuring what was being indirectly measured to insure that the indirect measurement was good enough. That's not happening with climatology. And that's generous granting that you might really know some society-crucial indirect measurements in the first place.

If they disagree then we need to understand why, but given that the are each from a fundamentally different source the chance that they would be different from reality in the same way at the same time to the same extent is vanishingly small.

Not unless the bias comes from a common source. For example, most such temperature proxies have been handled, aggregated, interpreted by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which has a known bias to support AGW (to the extent that they would refuse to discuss issues with temperature proxies in public).

Finally, you're committing the fallacy of assuming that because we did something successfully elsewhere that we're doing it just as successfully in climatology.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[KalvinB]

It was still colder in Phoenix in June than it was the year I moved here in 1995.

Also, in 1995 it was snowing in Minnesota until late April. A few years prior, the snow never completely covered the ground.

The fact that the weather can change so drastically so quickly should disprove any scare mongering.

I remember when they used to blame the warm winters or cold winters on El Nino's intensity that year.

Now we've got a bunch of chicken littles running around.

Wikipedia sourcing

[turkeyfish]

Actually, Wikipedia does include a lot of references to primary peer reviewed literature. Keep in mind that while any jackass can edit things, that hardly means they stay inaccurate for very long.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Ah yes we should dismiss a the fact that the latest 6% of the data is different from the remaining 94% of the data in a manner that makes sense and matches predictions given our current understanding of climate systems.

Yes. Especially when you consider that most of the 94% is pretty bad. And there's always confirmation bias. You might remember me talking about that. There will always be some sort of extreme 1 in 15 weather in any given decade of the last 150 years.

The predictions based on these models matches the current trend confirming them, the fact that it is also found to be extreme enough that this decade is exceptional is not a lone point and adds to this, you can not dismiss the models as unproven when you have proof or the weather as just weird when it matches models which are based on such extensive data that point in to a further trend.

The big thing you are missing here is that for something to be evidence, it has to distinguish between the null hypothesis and the hypothesis you desire. The presence of extreme weather, especially when starting with the skimpy data we've collected over all history, is to be expected. It doesn't support your model any more than it supports the negation of your model.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[t4ng*]

New technologies have allowed us to incentivize the mining of prior cost prohibitive oil fields.

You do realize that your statement illustrates exactly what happens when you hit peak production of any limited resource, don't you? The invisible-hand-of-the-free-markets don't spend money on developing new technology to better extract resources if those resource cheap and abundant to get to.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[ImprovOmega]

It goes in cycles. First we thought the sun went around the earth. Then we discovered that it makes more sense to view the earth as going around the sun. Then we progressed to realizing that the sun is really going around the galaxy every ~250 million years. Finally we came to the realization that, for certain reference frames, the sun *does* go around the earth, the maths are just much more difficult to work with. Similarly the earth is flat in the sense that its surface can be viewed as a two dimensional object and it is all confusingly dependent on how you look at it.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[I'm New Around Here]

Who buys a convertible in BC? lol

Future thinkers, apparently. lol

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[ImprovOmega]

Where I live we hit 122 degrees in *June*. It was something like a 50-year record high. When people think of Southern California they forget that half of it is the frickin' Mojave Desert.

Re:Something will have to give

[iggymanz]

False, there is no shortage of energy for desalination anywhere there is people.

1,000 ppm (0.1%) will not have any problematic effects, even renowned climatologists have said two or three times present level is not much an issue.

there is end to potassium mining, known reserves are good for centuries.

phosphorous is interesting matter, could say global reserve of concentrated ore will run out in a century unless serious recycling of solid waste done. But alternative view is that as it really does comprise 1/1000 of the earth's rock, supply in is vast but dilute, we'd have to produce by other means

 

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Maxo-Texas]

Not fifteen years. About 8 years (since 2006).

http://climate.nasa.gov/images/616910main_gisstemp_2011_graph_lrg.jpg

There was a peak in about 2005, then temperatures fell down until 2001 when they had a similar temperature high (not a new high).

The five year mean temperature increased about .2 degrees between 2000 and 2005ish and then had held steady for a while.

I dislike many of these graphs because they are scaled to make the increase look very dramatic. Convincing people of the reality of global warming is as much political as scientific so I suppose such tricks are necessary.

Anti global warming folks do the reverse and set the scale such that the fluctuation looks meaningless.

Ice remains at freezing a long time but eventually it does melt.

Fundamental problem is TOO MANY PEOPLE.

And we are not going to address that so the rest is just pointless.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[h4rr4r]

I did not really like any of her books. They are generally poorly written and hypocritical. I am not a fan of objectivism, which is really just capitalist nihilism. I prefered Wealth of Nations.

What you are talking about is a resource peaking. As the price shoots up suddenly fields that would not be productive suddenly can be, but supply does not really increase.

How is it trollbait? She supported might makes right as her only real moral philosophy. Your favorite Adam Smith book clearly contradicts that.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[FriendlyPrimate]

This spring and summer in the United States has been closer to the long term average than most previous years. However, you have to look at what's happening globally. Right now, Europe and Asia are experiencing ALL-TIME record heat: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2483

Over the past decade, record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record low temperatures. Even in a warming climate, we would expect to see times when the weather is colder than normal, even record breaking cold. However, the fact that the number of high-temperature records far exceeds the number of low-temperature records is strong proof of a warming climate. A single 'nice summer' is not proof of anything.

Re: Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria

[um... Lucas]

It doesn't even seem so extreme. I mean, all we have to do is print up 60 trillion then there's no more problem, right?

Now, if the problem would cost 21,000,001 bitcoins to fix, we would have a horrendous situation! :)

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Simple thermostats don't measure temperature directly they measure the level of the bend in a strip made of metals with different expansions at different temperatures

That is quite deceptive. I'll just note that there is a direct, accurate, and well known correlation between the bending of those metals and the temperature of those metals. And the thermostat is designed to limit the extent of other effects. That makes it a direct measurement of temperature.

For ice cores the proxy is the isotope balance of the gas trapped in the bubbles between what would have been snow but is now compacted and sealed ice, tree rings measure plant growth rates, sea levels obvious but crude measure of polar ice, and sediment measures such as how much desert on the planet at a given time via radioisotope dating can also be used. These are not more complex nor more distant you need something that lasts and is effected by climate in a reactively constant manner that can be measured today and that we can calibrate from modern measurements, hard to do but simple in principle.

Tree rings can't. Recall one of the many dramas of climategate was the private discussion of the discarding of tree ring data from after 1960 precisely because it failed as a temperature proxy. And I find it interesting how you ignore difficulties (such as not measuring what you think proxies should be measuring) as "simple in principle".

In practice, you are wasting my time with breezy generalizations.

Re:What about a "15 year pause" would worry us?

[perceptual.cyclotron]

What is it about confidence intervals that is so incredibly difficult to grasp?

Re:Something will have to give

[rrohbeck]

I'll just let this stand for itself.

Mother Nature says âhey, pull my fingerâ

[mnemotronic]

... I owe you one; pesky humans.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[turkeyfish]

I fail to see what is favorable about having your house burn down because global warming is drying out much of the vegetation in the American southwest.

Perhaps you could explain.

Re: Mother Nature says âhey, pull my finger&#

[mnemotronic]

Friggin' android/nexus quote marks.

Re:Really dumb alarmist nonsense

[Zontar The Mindless]

"Cool" summer? You've not been in Europe or China the last couple of months, have you?

Re:Something will have to give

[judoguy]

In a lot of the world population is actually declining. I'm not sure we *are* going to breed ourselves to death.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

And then you can compare the butterfly diagrams posted by the parent to the surface temperature readings from the last 130 years. The Earth is undergoing significant climate change.

I wouldn't blame the GP entirely though. Scientists are so bad at actually relaying information to regular folks that it partially ends up in the domain of moneyed cranks that can afford to pay for good animations and pseudo-documentaries. Also, it doesn't help that many of the politicians and influential business people are old and don't care what happens in 50 years time.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[riverat1]

Anyway, appeal to authority arguments have been debunked. Its 99% of respondent scientists in a ten year old survey. Global Cooling first. Then Peak Oil. Then it was Global Warming. Then it was Anthropomorphic Climate Change. Carbon PPM Quantity Tipping points. Fracking Earthquakes. Methane Bombs. It'd be a lot easier to believe all these sounding of alarms if they ever led to different conclusions. They usually end up with the same prognosis: More government oversight over personal freedom, reduced economic output, central planning, Al Gore.

It's apparent that you have no more than a superficial knowledge of any of those things if you are able to dismiss all of them so easily as simply vehicles for more government control. If you could make a cogent scientific argument about it I'd be more willing to listen to you. As you say there is no optimal temperature to the Earth and it doesn't really care if humans exist or not. But most humans do and most of those things you mention have to potential to massively disrupt our civilization (global cooling was just a blip that was quickly dismissed). So I suppose your Randian solution is to just let civilization slowly fall apart as the effects of climate change worsen. I'd rather see my grandchildren have a decent life.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm guessing the GP is pointing to the trendline being downward since y2k.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[riverat1]

Because someone went through the trouble of directly measuring what was being indirectly measured to insure that the indirect measurement was good enough. That's not happening with climatology.

I doubt you have enough knowledge to even know if that's true or not of climatology. Do you have any evidence that "most such temperature proxies have been handled, aggregated, interpreted by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia" or is that just your biased opinion? As far as I know most temperature proxies are done by the individual researchers and most of them are not associated with the CRU.

Re:But there is one because YOU say so, eh?

[riverat1]

So far the "data and trends" are not outside of model projections (at the 95% confidence level) so it's impossible to say they are wrong at this point. If the data and trends do depart from model projections that will be the time to go back to the drawing board.

Re:Analogy

[MrHanky]

If the 31 dollars were profits on the 30 dollars you spent, then you certainly didn't become poorer. Money isn't wealth.

Re:But there is one because YOU say so, eh?

[riverat1]

Well actually the standard climatological period as defined by the World Meteorological Organization is 30 years. I think I'll go with the experts.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[riverat1]

Dream on.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[interval1066]

Your an idiot. Seriously. I'm not perpetuating anything, merely pointing out a link on the web. I didn't qualify it. THIS is why people are starting to call people like you envronmental fascists. NO ONE can have a view that contradicts yours, right?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jbolden]

Except it is going up till about 2003. And even then it is mostly higher highs with some offsetting lower lows causing a very slight downtrend. But staying near an absolute top isn't evidence of a collapse.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[MrHanky]

It's not a view, it's a claim: "like the world did [worry about global cooling] when I was back in highschool in the 70's". Your claim is false, it's proven false, it's known to be false. Fascists never were overly preoccupied with the truth, a trait they have in common with you. However, I don't find that a reason for calling you, or people like you, fascist. You're just a dishonest prick. A common liar.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[riverat1]

You look at the short downturn since 2000 but ignore the other short term downturns that happened over the previous century. That's scientific of you. /sarc

Re:What about a "15 year pause" would worry us?

[riverat1]

Not if the zero trend is within the 2 sigma confidence levels of the 0.16C/decade prediction.

60 trillions USD

[manu0601]

Is it 60 trillions USD once, or on each year?

The future and reality

[i]

No fear: http://www.wimp.com/nofear/

A reprieve

[Roger W Moore]

The longest we've got is about 400 million years or so before the Sun starts making it impossible to live on the planet.

I think the figure you are looking for is more like 4 billion years although if in 400 million years time there are still humans as we know them around I would be amazed - there are very few (any?) complex organisms which have survived for that length of time.

Re:It's a self correcting issue

[girlintraining]

The only question is whether or not we exploit these resources or we let them evaporate into the atmosphere.

Or we could switch to nuclear power, and then pump the methane to the bottom of the ocean, where it will be compressed into liquid form, should it ever be determined this is a problem. And rising ocean levels aren't a big concern to me... if you look at where most of the assholes and rich people of the world are, you'll quickly agree: Coastal cities being wiped out would be a good thing. :D

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[dryeo]

As I remember it, there was some discussion about the affects of CO2 vs soot IIRC with discussion about how much CO2 induced warming would be counteracted by soot caused global dimming. Along with a cold trend the media did harp on the global cooling angle and without an internet we didn't have much access to actual science articles. The models also were much more primitive then. By the '80's it was becoming obvious that the CO2 would have the larger influence especially with a lot of other pollutants getting cleaned up.
This also raises questions about the affects of Chinese industrialization, especially the large number of dirty coal plants. Don't see much discussion about whether it is counteracting the warming or not and how much. Of course the thing with soot is it has a short life time compared to CO2 and even if it is delaying warming, once the Chinese get more health conscious and clean up their act temperature might go up fast as we know the quantity of CO2 is fast increasing.

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[riverat1]

I'm Poe'd. I can't tell if you're serious or writing a parody. Good one.

Re:It's a self correcting issue

[riverat1]

How are you going to collect it all when it's spread out over millions of square miles of ocean?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

I still have never heard a reasonable explanation on how the 'climategate' wasn't a case of fraud. The explanation I heard was that the researchers didn't do anything unethical, they just hide the data that contradicted the outcome they wanted. As I understand it, the tree ring data was used up until direct measurements started being taken. They 'hide' the tree ring data after that because the tree ring data didn't match up with the actual temperatures. The tree ring data was shown to be invalid, yet the continued to use it anyway when it produced the outcome they were looking for.

Did I miss some announcement where they removed tree ring data completely, or are they still using known bad data?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

Peak Oil is most certainly a sham. There are something like a dozen different definitions, and those who swear by it keep cycling through them in an attempt to sound like it makes sense. The definitions range from bizarrely ridiculous, to irrelevant non-issues, to conditions that have continued to repeat themselves for the last 70 years.

Unless you define what you mean by 'peak oil', your question cannot be answered.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[HiThere]

The thing about that "lowered solar output" is that it's a part of a cycle. I forget the length, though IIRC is isn't the same as the 11 year sunspot cycle. But it's not a permanent lowering. It's not even a long-term lowering. And, again IIRC, it's predicted to be already nearing the next up-swing.

Yes, there is currently lowered solar output. So **** what! It's just one part of a cycle, and it doesn't stop at the bottom just because you want it to.

Plunty of methane released from this.

[ralphaostrander]

Permafrost melt. http://unc.news21.com/index.php/stories/alaska.html

Re:More hoax maskerading as "science"

[I'm just joshin]

You can both have fewer hot days and a higher average temperature.

Besides, the folk at the airport weather station are in on the conspiracy to bump the numbers to keep the Californians in California.

-J

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

there is a direct accurate and well known correlation between temperature and the isotope balance in the atmosphere

This is an example of making shit up. The "direct, accurate, and well known correlation" isn't so.

Second, we aren't actually measuring the isotope balance of that atmosphere, but of what got to us now say via ice cores or deposits in lakes.

For the tree rings we have 2 possibilities, 1 the tree rings never where accurate, 2 they are accurate for older data but something, probably us, started to make things less linked to climate around the start of the 1960s.

So far this is passable logic.

To see which one is more likely take several non tree based measures of climate and compare them too the trees over a long period of time, the longer they match them less likely that the older tree data is bad, oh wait we already have a huge amount of data compared and it is only the last few decades and only in the higher northern areas that it really starts to go bad.... so which is more likely?

That's a poor bluff. There's no actual measurement of that climate except through a bunch of easy to distort proxies.

Why do you need to project such false confidence?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

As far as I know most temperature proxies are done by the individual researchers and most of them are not associated with the CRU.

What did I say? "Handled, aggregated, and interpreted". I didn't say "done by". They aren't famous for researching and measuring temperature proxies (though their researchers do a bit of this), but rather for accumulating them into aggregate climate reconstructions.

Do you have any evidence that "most such temperature proxies have been handled, aggregated, interpreted by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia" or is that just your biased opinion?

They have 150 years of instrumental measurements of surface temperatures. This is the primary link between modern climate observations and pre-industrial temperature proxies. Many climatologists still refer to standard CRU paleoclimate reconstructions like the Hadley Center/CRU series when calibrating their own temperature proxies or discussing climate phenomena in the industrial to modern period.

In addition, they have aggregated extensive collections of paleoclimate data.

In addition, this data has been processed and interpreted. There are an absurd degree of vagaries in how, when, and where the original data was collected. Various undesirable defects such as the urban heat island effect or local issues (permanent moving of weather stations from one location to a nearby but somewhat different location) can distort long temperature records.

These records are incorporated into a lot of research, for example, the famous Mann et al "hockey stick" paper which used "the collection of annual resolution dendroclimatic[eg, tree ring], ice core, ice melt, and long historical records used by Bradley and Jones" (Jones being the head of the CRU) and "Monthly instrumental land air and sea surface temperature grid-point data (Fig. 1b) from the period 1902-95" which also was provided by the same authors as before.

Here, both most of the pre-industrial records and the industrial era records were provided by CRU sources.

IPCC has often quoted such data sets and has CRU researchers on some of their committees.

There's a great deal of genuine complexity and nonuniformity in the data that the CRU collects. What they do has to be done in order to use this data effectively. But the point behind my original remark is that any bias in how the CRU does this work would affect a great deal of research and derivative models. I think it's actually happened, but YMMV. They are gatekeepers for significant parts of climatology and I think it's poor science to discount that risk.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[ultranova]

Where is the evidence for this claim? Need I remind you that no one has actually measured temperatures directly during the Medieval Optimum?

So the grandparent's claim (that there is nothing to worry about, since it was warmer then and nothing happened) is utterly baseless, then?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[MrHanky]

Wrong. There was one article. One. That's not harping. If there were more than one, then surely they would have been escavated by the denialists by now. Yet they cling to that Newsweek article as if it were referenced by everyone else, every day.

As for scientific articles, you've got access to Google Scholar right now, and guess what? It's got year delimiters. If you want to "teach the controversy", at least use readily available data. Here is a review article to get you started. It's a review article, an overview of the then current research on the subject, so you'll see that it actually has something to say about soot and aerosols:

Several studies in the past have concluded that if these aerosols were distributed uniformly over the earth they would increase the earth's overalll albedo by scattering sunlight and thereby cause a general cooling (Rasool & Schneider 1971, Yamamoto & Tanaka 1972, Bryson & Wendland 1975, Budyko 1977). The reason why this is almost surely not the case are summarized by Kellogg, Coakley & Grams (1975) (see also Kellogg 1977), and they are briefly restated. First, such industrial aerosols (and the same would apply to agricultural slash-and-burn smoke) do not remain airborne in the lower levels of the atmosphere for more than about five days on average (Moore, Poet & Martell 1973). That means they are a regional phenomenon and are limited for the most part to the land areas where they were created.

I'm a bit impressed that the referenced article by Yamamoto and Tanaka (1972) is also freely available on the interwebs, and can be found here. And even that one accepts global warming due to CO2, and the local variability of aerosols.

LOL!!

[mcgrew]

Your an idiot.

Delicious irony! You're uneducated, which explains why you've fallen for oil company propaganda.

Global cooling was a conjecture [not scientific theory] during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. The current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the 20th century.[1]

But you go ahead and listen to the Koch brothers self-serving fairy tales.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[mcgrew]

You're just a dishonest prick. A common liar.

Considering his "your an idiot" I'd say he's not a liar, but an uneducated, ignorantly opinionated fool who's fallen for Koch brothers' lies.

There seem to be an awful lot like him here, judging from wild swings in the moderation of my original comment. 20% actually modded it "troll" despite the fact that was informative, and intended to be educational with links to wikipedia explaining the science.

Someone like him, whom uses greengrocer's apostrophes, thinks lose and loose are the same verb, doesn't know the difference between who's and whose, is very obviously uneducated. Ever notice that none of the deniers have any concept of spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[mcgrew]

If you'll notice, the NASA article and graphs are very short term, 1995 to the present. That small a time is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

Read your own link a little more slowly.

The Maunder Minimum

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented.
<snip>
MSFC Solar Physics Branch members Wilson, Hathaway, and Reichmann have studied the sunspot record for characteristic behavior that might help in predicting future sunspot activity. Our current predictions of solar activity for the next few years can be found at this link. Although sunspots themselves produce only minor effects on solar emissions, the magnetic activity that accompanies the sunspots can produce dramatic changes in the ultraviolet and soft x-ray emission levels. These changes over the solar cycle have important consequences for the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Almost Certainly Happened Before

[Ferretman]

It'll happen again.

No, this is NOT the "end of the world".
br Ferret

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Ferretman]

LOL! Warmites are so cute in their dogged insistence that only cherry-picked information be considered! I'll bet you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy too.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Recall one of the many dramas of climategate was the private discussion of the discarding of tree ring data from after 1960 precisely because it failed as a temperature proxy.

"Private discussion"? People wrote fucking papers about it. Jacoby 1995 and Briffa 1998 for example.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Nobody "hid" anything - they found that the most recent tree ring data didn't match the temperature data as well as the earlier tree ring data did. They wrote papers about it. It was a well known problem.

The tree ring data isn't invalid, it just has its limits.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Where is the evidence for this claim? Need I remind you that no one has actually measured temperatures directly during the Medieval Optimum?

So the grandparent's claim (that there is nothing to worry about, since it was warmer then and nothing happened) is utterly baseless, then?

Denialism is obviously a quantum effect - we know the MO was warmer and simultaneously we don't know what the temperature was.

In order to collapse the wave function we need an observer, and the denialists are dont seem tp be aware enough to count.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Have you not been paying attention for the last six months? The AGW establishment has admitted the pause and are scrambling to find the reason.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/trend

Wonder why you are so interested in 1998? Like the taste of cherries?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Plumpaquatsch]

Your an idiot. Seriously. I'm not perpetuating anything, merely pointing out a link on the web. I didn't qualify it.

Yeah. Sure. Putting a title on a link is not "qualifying it", especially when the title implies it stands for the world. You are the idiot, Sir.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

You see, just to keep the right wing nut-jobs happy a market based solution was invented (one that had already worked for similar problems).

But that was based on the false idea that the right wing nut-jobs wanted a solution, so it failed.

We're probably going to get carbon taxes because of that.

Please watch the video I link to in my sig. It has a very nice man who explains to you why the right wing must get its head out of its arse as quickly as possible.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

So, when the data doesn't fit, just don't use that data. You like every other person who has tried to defend this keeps saying that the tree rings are not reliable, but it is OK to use when it gives the results you want. I am looking for an explanation that doesn't include only including the data when it shows what you want or is unverifiable while throwing away the data when it doesn't show what you want.

There doesn't appear to be one.

Re: Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!

[DEN_GUY]

I was just watching Nova's "Secrets of the Sun" last night and they said 2013 was predicted to be solar max. So this agrees well with your diagram. Also, we've had at least 10 years to see the actual effects of AGP, and none of the gloom and doom seems to be panning out. Carl Sagan said extreme predictions require extreme evidence. So far, not happening, IMHO.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Yes, private discussions. Note those papers were written in the 90s and the emails in question written in the next decade.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Newtonian mechanics don't work under some conditions.

That doesn't mean that we throw them away, it just means that we only use them under the conditions where they work.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Lets have secret conclaves to hide information that has been publicly available for 10 years.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[khallow]

Lets have secret conclaves to hide information that has been publicly available for 10 years.

That's not the point. The point is selling one story to the public while having a different, less confident story in private. It's a degree of dishonesty.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

Strawman arguments also don't work under some conditions. That doesn't make them valid. So, at this point, no one has yet explained why the 'hide the decline' statement wasn't exactly the kind of fraud that they were accused of. All I keep hearing is that 'it wasn't fraud". They were just hiding data that didn't agree with their conclusions.

That's just simply gross!

[Optali]

/. is not what it used to be :(

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Optali]

You put it on pause? Cool! Your' my hero!!!

Re:Fundamental problem

[Maxo-Texas]

There was no balance built over many millions of years. Snowball earth already happened twice. There was a severe mini ice age less than a 600 years ago.

The earth's climate fluctuates with or without humans.

Human waste (which is more of an issue with more people) shifts the average fluctuation point warmer.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Optali]

No!!! It's real Science.
You forget the quadrature of Venus with Saturn in the House of Scorpio and the nefarious influence of Aquarius in the 3th House.

Like it or not...we are not prepared for anything

[FrankenPC]

If both Louisiana disasters have demonstrated anything, it's that as a people, we can not deal with any disasters natural, man made, or otherwise. So I posit that regardless of our personal religious beliefs....and they are religious if they are anything other than scientific...we prepare for any disaster. Let's say that global warming, a science based on mean global ocean temperatures, is real and we care that the American way of life continue in light of such a possible disaster. Wouldn't it be in our best interest to prepare? Ahead of time? And in the process increase the strength of our disaster network to handle just about any viable contingency? How is this not a great idea all around? For the people of the USA?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[jbolden]

One of things I think the environmentalists need to do is stop classifying all this as denialism. These are different arguments.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Where is the straw?

They were just hiding data that didn't agree with their conclusions.

Writing peer-reviewed papers in published journals is a pretty poor way of "hiding data".

The data which they "hid" by telling the world about didn't "disagree with their conclusions".

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Plumpaquatsch]

I'm guessing the GP is pointing to the trendline being downward since y2k.

If you zoom in real close, the "trendline" is going up again in the last year. BTW, how exactly is the "trendline" computed?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[cwsumner]

It's just strange that human-caused global warming is apperently causing warming on Mars, too. I don't see how the CO2 is getting that far....

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

Where is the straw?

Newtonian mechanics don't work under some conditions. That doesn't mean that we throw them away, it just means that we only use them under the conditions where they work.

Here is what we know:

* Researchers used tree ring data as a temperature proxy in their published climate predictions.
* Researchers found that when compared to direct measurement, tree ring data does not match actual temperatures.
* Researchers continue to use tree ring data (that they now know is invalid) when it shows rising temperatures.
* Researchers drop tree ring data when it show dropping temperatures. (AKA 'hide the decline')
* Hacker breaks into researchers email and finds email that the researcher tells another researcher about selectively dropping data.
* The email clearly states the purpose of dropping the data is to change the outcome of the prediction.
* Hacker releases email to the public.
* Climate research community declares on fraud committed.


No one has explained how using data from a known bad source. You have made 3 posts in an attempt to do so and still have not given any explanation. You have stated that it is known the data is bad, Newtonian mechanics doesn't work under some situations, and that the researchers admitted that their data was bad.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Eunuchswear]

Here is what we know:

* Researchers used tree ring data as a temperature proxy in their published climate predictions.

Yup

* Researchers found that when compared to direct measurement, tree ring data does not match actual temperatures.

Under some conditions, which they discussed at length in publicly published papers.

* Researchers continue to use tree ring data (that they now know is invalid) when it shows rising temperatures.

They do not know the data is invalid they know it diverges from the temperature data under certain conditions.

* Researchers drop tree ring data when it show dropping temperatures. (AKA 'hide the decline')

Researchers use the known temperature instead of a proxy when they know the temperature. They talk about this ad-nauseam.

* Hacker breaks into researchers email and finds email that the researcher tells another researcher about selectively dropping data.

That's not what he said.

* The email clearly states the purpose of dropping the data is to change the outcome of the prediction.

What prediction? It's a graph of historical temperature, not future temperature.

No one has explained how using data from a known bad source.

It's not a known bad source. It's a source that is known to only work under certain conditions. Many other sources have limits. You do know that a mercury thermometer won't work for temperatures below 234K? Does that mean mercury thermometers are a "known bad source"?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Belial6]

And that makes four.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Magius_AR]

The "15-year pause" in global warming is bunk: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming

*blink* How is it bunk? The very article you linked to acknowledged there is a pause:

Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but have been relatively flat over the most recent 15 years to 2013. This has prompted speculation that human induced global warming is no longer happening, or at least will be much smaller than predicted. Others maintain that his is a temporary pause and that temperatures will again rise at rates seen previously. The Met Office Hadley Centre has written three reports that address the recent pause in global warming and seek to answer the following questions:

Seriously, do you alarmists actually read the stuff you link to?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[mcgrew]

It appears a slight change in the planetâ(TM)s surface luster has caused its temperature to rise.

Earth CO2 has nothing to do with it. There is no mechanism in play to cause both.

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[GameboyRMH]

More than you did. Do you only read the first 2 paragraphs, or are surface temperatures the only temperatures that matter to you?

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[Magius_AR]

Surface temperatures are the only thing alarmists have ever used int he past, so why shouldn't we focus there? More importantly, the pause in surface temperature increase is proven. The claims of ocean temperature sinking and "well, we just haven't haven't waited long enough yet" are all suggestions and/or projections. The papers are scientists best guessing as to why surface temperatures have stopped rising -- they aren't proof as to it not occurring.. The fact you can't admit that is a shame and just shows your bias. Hell, paper #2 is labeled "Recent pause in global warming"!

Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!!

[GameboyRMH]

Ocean temperature sinking is not a suggestion or a projection. It's an observed phenomenon and by far the largest factor mitigating surface warming. It's not a guess either. But continue to stick your head in the sand, as long as things are nice there it doesn't matter what's happening on the other side of the surface, right?

I'm glad you appear to have made a cursory reading of the entire summary page at least. It's a start.