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Dialing Back the Alarm On Climate Change
An anonymous reader writes "A leaked copy of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made the rounds and the good news is that the predicted temperature rise expected as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than predicted in 2007. From the article: 'Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet. Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.'"
CLIMATEDERP!
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I look forward to the calm, rational, and coherent discussion!
For once, there may be a thread on this site that avoids tangenting off into politics. It will be refreshing to witness a debate that does not invoke Nazis, gun control, or the results of previous US elections, because those are totally offtopic and everyone will realize that.
Two mistakes pop up immediately int the article - IPPC (eh? OK, typo) and "The Journal of the American Meteorological Society". It's IPCC and the Bulletin of the AMS (BAMS). Maybe this guy creamed himself while typing, it is the WSJ after all.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Given the inertia of our industrial and economic processes, it only means that the unstoppable iceberg will simply crawl slower. But at least we have more time. I also don't think that this means a time-out for ocean acidification.
Ezekiel 23:20
I remember in second grade ca 1974 my teacher explaining that the Earth were slowly heading into a new ice age. If I ever meet him again I'll buy him a beer!
Except that was a fringe idea that was obliterated in peer review fairly quickly. But people for some reason tend to fixate the weirdest shit in their memories, instead of the actually useful stuff.
Ezekiel 23:20
The world's climate is such a huge, complex and fluid system that the best supercomputer in existence will only be able to model its future behavior "very approximately". It should thus not come as a big shock when what the computer models predicted in 2007 doesn't happen exactly in 2013, or indeed further down the timeline. It is only when more complex & accurate simulations can be run on supercomputers that we can have any reasonable expectancy of modeling the future behavior of the earth's climate with any accuracy.----- And suppose for a moment that we happen to realize further down the line that "Climate Change" worries were a bit overblown? Well, no harm done! Without the Climate Change alarmism of the last 2 decades, nobody would have put much money into developing renewables like wind and solar or tidal energy. We also might not have Toyota Priuses or Tesla electric cars on the market today. Not to mention computers and other household devices that save a lot of energy compared to past cousins. ------ So whether Global Warming is real or not, fear of it has influenced everything from automobile to refrigerator designs to become more "earth friendly". That's a good thing in my book....
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
(Sound of pooch being screwed.) This is how real science works, particularly with highly complex issues like the earth's climate. We learn new things as we go along, and when new knowledge means we need to adjust our undestanding, that's what is done. The next update by the IPCC (if it gets funded, that is) may well show that what we learn in the interim indicates that the current estimates of climate change were too small. Unfortunately, the polarization of politics will take this latest IPCC report (if it indeed says what the article states) as an indication that these science types have been lying to us all along and they should now be ignored and driven from the temple. Efforts to deal with the effects of the upcoming changes will be killed off and nothing will be done until it's too late to do much of anything other than hope to cope.
I'm finding it hard to see what the change is here.
The old number was that the doubling sensitivity was most likely to be in the range 2 C-to-4.5 C. Specifically:
"we conclude that the global mean equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2C to 4.5C, with a most likely value of about 3C."
(reference: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5.html#box-10-2 )
This report-- if the leaked version is accurate-- is that it's "'likely' to be above 1.5 degrees C, 'very likely' to be below 6 degrees C".
That's not a "reduction" or a "retreat"-- it is, at best, a slightly higher range. But since, as the summary says, "Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.," I don't see that there's any clear change at all-- just different wording.
This is spin-- there isn't be anything new here.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Just a few days ago, there was a story how the ice in the arctic "rebounded" 60%.
The real story is in this graph:
http://postimg.org/image/hcadakghv/
We've been measuring arctic ice the late 70s. It's at it's maximum in March, melts during the summer, and sees it's minimum in September. 2012 was the record year we had so far for the LEAST amount of artic ice. 2007 has second place and 2011 has 3rd. This year we have more than 2012. This was expected among scientists because of something called regression towards the mean. That concept basically says when an extreme outlier event occurs, we expect the next event to be closer to the average. Basically, the entire hoopla is about playing math games to appear more impressive than it is.
When the story came out, it was premature the typical September lowpoint, so don't expect the 60% figure to quite hold that high, but it is higher than last year none the less. However, you can see it's still well below 00s average and that every decade has since the measurements started have less and less ice.
So there you have it? Maybe the heat is going into the oceans? Then melting the poles as the currents do a good job of distributing the equator heat around via currents. The ice melts, breaks off whatever, and like icecubes in a warm drink, cool it down.... until there is no ice left?
Come on, what is with the propraganda here? Last year was an obsolute low point in Arctic Ice extent.... and we get stories of so called "rebounds"? Just look at the graph and tell me that it trend isn't clear.
The author of this article, Matt Ridley, is a known climate change denialist and of course the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch and therefore operates under the same umbrella as Fox News.
Supposed leaks from the IPCC document have already been mischaracterized in the right-wing media. See, for example, Phil Plait's demolition of them here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/09/10/climate_change_sea_ice_global_cooling_and_other_nonsense.html
Or if you prefer your demolition in video format:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH5D9P6KYfY
I have no reason to trust the right-wing's interpretation of the IPCC document before it is officially announced and I can check it for myself. Why don't you try WAITING for it to be released before you start spreading this very likely BS.
1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit)
1.5 degrees Celsius is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature#Conversion
I really wish that both "sides" in the climate change "debate" could put away the hyperbole and come to grips with the fact that we need to live in some way approaching equilibrium with the various processes happening here on planet Earth. That's not just about co2 production. Even though there is unquestionably consensus among climate scientists that the rising co2 level IS significant, there are *many* other factors at play. It won't matter if we get the co2 situation under control, but still have high-levels of fresh water pollution and half-dead oceans.
We need to pollute less, period.
We need to dramatically increase our total energy efficiency, which can largely be achieved by picking the "low-hanging fruit" of building insulation, indoor daytime lighting and industrial energy usage. All three of these can be addressed (easily!) with incentives like rebates and tax credits -- granted that takes political will, which seems in short supply, but it's all there already, just waiting to happen: just (gradually) shift the subsidies currently granted to fossil fuel companies over to businesses and homeowners that are willing to make investments in long-term energy efficiency and savings, it just makes sense: since energy saving == money saving.
The reality is that our total energy usage is increasing, so the more we stretch it, the more comfortable humanity can be in the long term. We need to be building as many solar, wind, wave, thermal gradient and salinity gradient systems as we can, all the while earnestly studying the effects and operation of these systems, and discovering our mistakes and correcting them as we go. We need better fission reactor designs: meaning serious R&D and testing. We need better (and more!) energy storage systems. And probably most importantly we need to come up with new ideas for generating and storing energy. Life is not static, we can't just say "hey, this is good enough" -- we have to make it better! Life forms don't stop evolving just because they find a successful niche. They keep going, because there's always more pressure around the corner. As humans, we've insulated ourselves from a lot of pressures, but that's really an illusion, since all we can ever really do is make buffers. Everything remains interconnected and interdependent.
As Bunker Roy says: Decentralize, demystify! People should know that they CAN provide for themselves, but they have to understand how it all works.
We are squandering our resources: geological, biological, financial and (most importantly) human. We need to refine our entire way of doing things.
The oil and coal WILL run out someday. It might be 100 years or 1000 -- but we need to be thinking truly long term here. It would be nice to still have plenty of oil and coal left for other stuff when we finally stop having to burn it for fuel just to keep the lights on. It's amazingly useful, and we have a finite supply.
Ignore the pause, ignore the missing heat, ignore the solar cycles, ignore the lack of sea level rise, ignore an arctic that is not ice free, ignore ENSO effects, ignore weather stations next to tarmacs, ignore urban heating, because they don't match the models.
Ignore the money being made, ignore the cost to society, ignore the lack of true peer review, ignore the missing data, ignore academic misconduct, ignore the denied FOI requests, ignore the emails, because that is just human nature.
When you are blind, everything is 'Nothing to see here, move along'...
2) Putting less pollutants into the air, water, and ground is a good thing.
Not if you make lots of money from selling the polluting stuff.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Let's compare.
The CO2 graph (direct measurement) is clearly climbing at a never-before-seen rate.
Okay, graphs don't climb. That nitpick aside, it's clear that what is never before seen is the rate. The rate at which a quantity Q climbs is its derivative dQ/dt.
CO2 levels 18 times as high as they are today. ... we are currently at one of the low points for CO2 levels in Earths history.
Here, you're talking about the quantity Q and not its rate of increase dQ/dt.
It may surprise you to learn that a quantity and its derivative are totally different things, and that one can be very low while the other is very high.
This is actually a good tangent, though, because it's a frequent mistake. Graphs of temperature and CO2 over very long periods of time are often dominated by sharp transitions. This causes people to say that the current situation is not unprecedented because there were very sharp transitions in the past! The problem is that if you pick an appropriate time scale, all transitions look sharp. The reader is mentally comparing two graphs (CO2 or temperature today, of the course of a few hundred years, with ages ago, over the course of thousands). Quantification is absolutely necessary. Very roughly, the rate of CO2 and temperature increase today is at least an order of magnitude higher than the "natural" transitions of the past that we have (indirectly) measured. So yes, unprecedented.
When Obama flies around nilly-willy on Air Force One he dumps tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Are you saying there's no climate change when he does that?
Have you ever heard of a form of ignorance called innumeracy? No? You should, because you have it.
If, in fact, flying Air Force One (which all presidents fly in, not just Obama, of course) dumps merely tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, yes, that would be irrelevant to climate change. If it dumped thousand of tons, that would be irrelevant. If it dumped millions of tons, that would be irrelevant.
Do you have the slightest idea how many tons of carbon dioxide are put in the atmosphere by humans every year?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com