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Upper Limit On Emissions Likely To Be Exceeded Within Decades
An anonymous reader writes "A panel of expert climate scientists appointed by the United Nations has come to a consensus on an upper limit for greenhouse gases. The panel says we will blow past this limit in just a few decades if emissions continue at their current pace. 'To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.' You can read a summary of the report's findings online (PDF). It says plainly, 'It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming (PDF) since the mid-20th century.'"
I will be dead by then. Good luck to the rest of you.
last i read the western countries were mostly reigning in their emissions and its the developing nations that are polluting the most now. except for a few exceptions like canada and norway who have large fossil fuel industries
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
Go ahead scammers, fight to the bitter end. There are still enough rubes out there to grab a few more bucks from. Never give up! Never surrender!
Funny. The IPCC puts its certainty at 95%, which is somewhat confusing as it's unable to show any accounting for that figure. According to Professor Judith Curry, the figure is arrived at by getting a load of climate scientists into a room and asking them what their certainty is!
What did my physics professor always say? If you don't know how accurate your measurement is, you haven't made a measurement.
It gets worse. The discrepancy between models and actual reality continues to grow. Surely this makes the science more uncertain, not less. Yet somehow the IPCC find themselves increasingly confident that they're right, even as everybody else becomes increasingly confident that the models they use are wrong. The whole thing is an absolute farce.
I'm no global warming denier, but at this point I think there's a simple harsh reality to accept: it doesn't matter how efficient we make things that run on fossil fuels, we're going to burn them all. At best with all of our "green initiatives" we might spread out burning those fuels over an extra few decades - a century at best, but over geologic timescales any delay we induce is pretty meaningless. Every bit of it is going to be burnt and released into the atmosphere.
Once they're all gone, THEN we'll be forced to adopt new more clean sources of energy. We just have to pray that by the time all the fossil fuels are burnt the planet isn't screwed up beyond any hope of recovery (ie, still habitable).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Well that's ok then. A panel has decided on an arbitrary "upper limit", and of course the planet will obey the panel. At one point, when everything you do to stop global warming fails, you'll come to realize that perhaps there are forces far greater than man at work. Failure to recognize this is sheer arrogance.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Scare tactics by the Greens. The worst kind of people.
Mass adoption of nuclear energy is the only option.
The green crowd have fantasies of state taxation and control; the problem is enterprises see through this immediately and apply their financial resources to make sure it doesn't happen.
Brass tacks; modern civilization and economic growth needs high quality energy sources and has an accelerating demand for energy. The only fuel that provides thermodynamic high-quality energy for base load that we have available is carbon and nuclear. The energy requirements of our society are epic. They will become more epic in the future!
The green movement needs to realize that the driver for economic activity trumps everything. Period. The energy is required to sustain the society we live in. If there isn't a rapid move to nuclear, we are going to burn every drop of oil, every ton of coal, and every liter of natural gas. That's the path we're on now.
I have hopes that we'll be able to fix the mess later - with technology being driven by clean energy sources. We need a push to get fusion reactors figured out. We know how fusion works; it powers those bombs everyone forgets don't exist. If people are so in arms about nuclear energy, why are they not freaking out about the pre-packaged critical nuclear reactions sitting on top of fueled missiles, only under control of a computer to avert disaster?
The lack of understanding of thermodynamics and energy is really epic; people advocating for restricting co2 production just don't understand how much energy is required.
Eventually the planet is going to suffer a catastrophe. A caldera volcano will explode; an asteroid will strike. The climate will change in a catastrophic means, just as it has done over and over again in the geologic record.
The sooner we have unlimited amounts of clean energy on tap to fix things, the better. The answer is staring at us in the widespread adoption of nuclear energy.
Until then.. go away, get off my lawn, and I'll continue to vote for people with energy polices grounded in reality.
..don't panic
If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
I recall reading somewhere that it would be > 1 unit of co2 due to the binding with a pair of oxygen atoms / molecules, but I'm not up on chemistry.
I guess if there are 3,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon left in the ground and we were to burn a total post-industrial-revolution quantity of 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes, that should be more than a trillion tonnes of co2 release?
All that manufacturing that went to the third world had a lot to do with that.
IN the first world, emissions are regulated.
Manufacturing then wen tover seas to take advantage of the surplus and very cheap labor but also the non-existent emissions regulations - subsequently lowering their costs.
Then, as capitalism works, those costs saving went directly in the CEOs pay. Because things sure as hell is NOT getting cheaper for me!
Oh to head off the "Americans like cheap stuff." - tell that to Apple ($600+ PHONE?!?), Harley Davidson, and every luxury car maker that's showing increasing sales.
And as our pay decreases if we STILL have a job - a lot of that is BECAUSE of all this off-shoring (also automation, too) - even these "cheap" things are becoming too expensive.
So anyway, the cause is all of our consumption - especially the Third World that wants to catch up to us in terms of consumption of stuff.
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.
My work here is dung.
Why don't we ever get articles like this one on slashdot?
We will consume less heating oil.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder if there's an upper limit on how many years can pass before a predicted future catastrophe actually starts becoming closer to the present...
More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.
But the majority of that isn't extractable. We will likely have to worry more about a fuel crisis than global warming.
All the people will die - The planet will get better and keep on going. Problem over.
Just drop a giant ice cube in the ocean and the problem will be solved, once and for all!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Everyone remembers the part of Aliens where the guy tells Ripley that colonists are terraforming the planet and Weyland Ytani maanufacturer that giant atmospheric cleaner-converter? I'm surprised that tech hasn't actually been built yet? I mean ot would take a lot of them and the waste accumulated would be toxic but maybe it could help? It's a stupid thought. Sorry. :( A.B.
I'm really curious about HOW the oil industry spreads their propaganda, because man it must be really effective.
Overpopulation might lead to a Malthusian Catastrophe well before 2040. In the animal kingdom such an event ("MC") is usually associated with a 99% population drop. Among humans, mostly smarter than the average dumb animal (except when it comes to breeding, apparently), it might be different; the last known MC experienced by humans who used their resources up faster than they could be replaced, happened on Easter Island, and the before-and-after population figures are not well known. Estimates range the population drop from 80% to, yes, 99%. For us today, we are at or past "peak oil", which means we can't use more oil to make more synthetic fertilizer for a growing global population. Fresh water is becoming a problem, two, as many important aquifers continue to be drained faster than they get replenished. The writing is basically on the wall --we can't keep growing the global population, and we can't even sustain the current population for much longer. So, an MC seems more inevitable than not. After which the rate we burn carbon is going to go down a whole lot....
Until it gets bad enough so everyone has to participate in the solutions, its just a poorly hidden wealth transfer scheme.
Have gnu, will travel.
They'll never admit it - hell, they're doubling-down now. I'm a bit dismayed that most here on slashdot have consumed the koolaid.
The whole website 350.org was created what now... 6 years ago? Because Bill McKibben said that 350 ppm CO2 was a "safe upper limit" for CO2 in the atmosphere in 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/350.org
http://350.org/
Since we are now well past 350ppm CO2 in the atmosphere: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
The IP-Cry-Wolf organization has to create a "new" upper limit. It's just more bullshit. They have no idea what any "safe upper limit" for CO2 is, they guess and publicize scary numbers every 5 years in order to secure future funding.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Yes, it's getting warmer. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that we are going to do anything about it through emissions limits.
What we should do is to avoid interfering with rapid economic development because developed nations can actually easily deal with climate change and rising sea levels (just look at the Dutch, a large part of their country is below sea level).
We should also stop subsidizing (implicitly and explicitly) fossil fuel extraction. Right now, many nations are adopting policies that, on the one hand use tax dollars to subsidize fossil fuels, then on the other hand use more tax dollars to support alternative energies; the entire scheme is a gigantic give-away to industry.
In addition, we should give up our silly opposition to nuclear. The best way of reducing carbon emissions is to make it easy to deploy efficient, modern nuclear plants, the kind that actually burns almost all the fuel.
Global Oil production has peaked and is going to come off the plateau in a few years with permanent production declines. With less oil and more expensive oil growth will come to end and the industrial revolution will run backwards, with in 50 years if humanity doesn't nuke itself carbon emissions will fall below 20th Century levels (ie back to the 19th Century). Problem solved, Not like there was ever a chance in hell it was going to happen in the first place!
I know someone will think of a rebuttal: What about coal? Well without a source of cheap oil it going to very difficult and expensive to dig out the amount we currently consume today. With out cheap oil for transportation and petro-chemicals, the global economy will collapse and demand for coal and other dirty fuels will drop off a cliff.
Rebuttal to fracking: Another myth. NatGas Fracking has already peaked since the real cost of getting NatGas from fracking is between $12 and $24 per mmbtu. Oil Fracking is going to peak in 2014 and 2015. The issue is that Frack wells become depleted after about 18 months. At some point they can't drill fast enough to both offset declines and expand production. Many of the regions that have claims of 100's of billions of barrels are over hyped and some other promising areas lack water needed for fracking. Fracking needs lots and lots of water! Fracking is just a temporary delay of the pending global energy crunch. Better stock up on sweaters!
http://peakoilbarrel.com/
And spend more on cooling
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
A panel of experts....They may be experts but appointing them to a panel pretty much tell us the outcome. "The panel will determine.." and no matter if they are right or wrong, they will determine exactly what was asked of them. In this case they could be right or they may be part of the UN bandwagon that wants to control the world. Would the panel ever come back and say that we are lucky we are pumping that CO2 into the air or it would already be another ice age? I bet not or the money would stop flowing to their research.
It has been stated on these pages over and over again. "Climate change" is all about the rise in the _rate_ of change, everyone wants it to be back to the rate _before_ the Industrial Rev. Hang the fact that it has been rising all long.
I take that as an admission that, "Let it change, but slowly enough that it does not bother me. My decedents can take care of themselves."
So, buy your carbon credits, if it makes you feel good. Then get in your SUV and drive to work.
Good luck to the rest of you.
That's the thing: nature doesn't care about you.
There WILL be a correction and it will suck and many, many people will die as a result.
Bluefin tuna, Tigers, Rhinos and innumerable tiny-niche animals will be a distant memory. Water will be a scarce commodity wars will be waged over. America's "bread basket" will largely be an arid land, devoid of any meaningful agriculture.
Areas that can only reasonably support a hundred thousand people (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco -- even less) will become like the ancient ruins of Rome, their uninhabited high-rises and derelict streets & freeways marking testament to a failed way of life.
65 Million years ago, we had our last mass-extinction event. We are in one now. Better animals than Human Sapiens (e.g., Class Trilobita) survived worse, but we will not.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change.
Please accept my personal guarantee that we can indeed create much more than one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon and that environmental condition can indeed get much worse than what ever the situation is at the trillion ton "limit". I assure you that we can create atmospheric carbon until soot precipitates from the air like rain and that it will take FAR more than a trillion tons to get there.
In the mean time shit will change in ways that the IPCC 'had no way of anticipating' and the precipitation of carbon, along with the 'certain extinction of all life on Earth' will NOT come to pass.
Hang the fact that it has been rising all long.
Actually, it's been falling for almost 10,000 years.
I take that as an admission that, "Let it change, but slowly enough that it does not bother me. My decedents can take care of themselves."
Sometimes simpletons don't understand the difference between stopping a speeding car with the brakes and stopping a speeding car with a brick wall.
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event, because that won't be good for any of us. At some place between 4 and 6 degrees above the baseline, most of the world is going to need new ecosystems. That replacement will be much easier on us, if nature has 1,000 years to adapt than if it has 30.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
"The polar bears will be fine."
Dyson is perhaps the greatest polymath of the age, the smartest man never to win the Nobel, and is a card carrying Climate Scientist to boot.
AGW or Anthropomorphic climate change is a Watermelon Crisis©.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/13/climate_tipping_point_concentration_of_carbon
Unlike the most recent articles saying we already hit the carbon ppm tipping point these U.N. pros knew the first rule of scare tactics:
Put the scare date way in the future and tell us we need to drastically reduce industry and increase energy price to stop the enviro-holocaust.
Gotta give credit where credit is due, the U.N. knows how to make their dates relatively unprovable.
Do you really think it's more likely that essentially every climatologist on the planet is involved in a conspiracy/scam, rather than the possibility that the data is correct and the earth is warming?
If so, I'm curious: Do you discount all fields of scientific research, or only those that result in conclusions you don't like?
You'd need to falsify this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrI03ts--9I
And explain this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/
And this:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/poles/
Go!
(otherwise, it would appear to be bullshit.)
Also, why did Lovelock say this:
"James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."
Also don't you think this is more likely?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all
Given the leaked IPCC report agreed with Lovelock and they admit they exaggerated and don't know what's gong on, why do you think they do?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Too late.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, they didn't. You're just an idiot.
They predicted more droughts, floods, massive storms. Exactly like we've had since 2007.
Exactly like we've had since the beginning of recorded history, you mean.
We've had more floods and droughts every year than the previous year since recorded history? Man, I'd like to see the pipe where you're getting your data from! I need to smoke me some of that!
I believe what you meant to say is that we've had floods and droughts since we started keeping records, not that we've had more floods and droughts. What you've completely missed is that we are having more of the same and they're increasing in severity.
On June 22 1633 the Catholic Church of Rome found Galileo Galilei "vehemently suspect of heresy" and subsequently sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition, commuted to house arrest the following day and his treatise "Dialogue" was banned and the publication of any of his works and future works was forbidden. [Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair].
Religions have been finding human beings guilty of all sorts of mischief throughout human history.
And today, the Heliocentric Theory is the foundation of modern Astronomy classes at universities world wide.
QED
I's like to see the data that says we're getting more droughts, floods, and massive storms.
Read the actual report.
Look, enough with your failed religion, deniers. You must bend to the Light side of the Force.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There. I said it.
I's like to see the data that says we're getting more droughts, floods, and massive storms.
Watch the news, look around you. It takes willful ignorance to not see this train wreck coming.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Heh. It takes willful ignorance to watch the news and accept it as fact.
Depends on what sources you call news, I guess. The reputable ones, in my book, include coverage of what the scientists say -- such as relating the conclusions presented at the UN today -- as well as coverage of major natural disasters. If the former happened to have predicted the later, proper news outlets will point that out.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event
Too late. 50+% of all large (ie. larger than a mouse) animal and plant species on the planet are endangered or worse. 90+% are in decline. The only ones still going are in places we do not like to be, or they have adapted to urban or rural human environment.
We already live in a Great Extinction Event. We caused it and we still don't see it. It is like living in a polluted environment and just taking it as "normal". Or denying that you need glasses to see until you put them on and say "wow! I didn't even know!". Denial is how we deal with things. We haven't really evolved to be rational species - most decisions we make are "gut feelings" and such. Even by those that *want* to be rational.
When we start affecting the microbial life on large scale, that's when we will really fuck up the planet and ourselves. It already started with gut bacteria(thanks to oral antibiotics) resulting in autism, c. diff infections, e. coli.poisonings and related.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that human activity is causing the changes.
Why is this "reasonable" when humans emit no more than 5% of all CO2 gas per year? Even if humans stop emitting all CO2 now we'll blow right past that 1 trillion ton mark only about a year later.
"Doomsday" will always be some time away. But when it comes to costs and economic hardship, that's now. Right now.
The shipping lanes of the Mississippi have lost capacity to low river levels. NOW.
The Great Lakes have receded, forcing ships to travel with only half their usual tonnage. NOW.
Warming has gotten the barkbeetles to flourish in the Rockies, helping forest fires, killing forests, and exacerbating floods. NOW.
Pacific islanders are having to install rainwater collection because their groundwater is turning saline. NOW.
Notice the Dutch are not happy AT ALL about sea level rise, and who are among the people speaking out the loudest about the problem.
While you're at it, notice the Dutch don't drive much.
Maybe someone should talk to China finally?
-Styopa
Those events were not predicted to have occurred yet.
"IF the Greenland sheet and WAIS melt, then Florida would be under 20ft of water and the foastline would look like this:"
But deniers have heard "it was predicted to have happened by now" and never bother to check if that was true: it's so convenient a lie, it remains alive.
Both opening assertions are completely false.
BEST showed the temperature records accurate and replicate IPCC results.
Surfacestations showed that if anything the correction for the heat island effect is over-done, reducing the warming trend the IPCC report compared to the one in reality.
However, reality was never your realm, was it.
China is investing in wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear plants.
Unlike the little SHIT country you live in, China is run by technocrats who have seen the writing on the wall.
And they ARE being asked to reduce emissions. If the little SHIT country you live in what do its part, it would HELP!
THANKS!
- The rest of the world
It wasn't me I swear!!
OK, Ok, I promise to reduce my beans consumption....
-- 29A the number of the Beast
So all the work to reduce green house gasses have been useless? Just shows it is a scam,
Climate change is driven by money nothing else.....
All the computer modeling is nothing more than a very vague long range forecast and where I live they got today's forecast wrong from yesterday.
What will happen if ice glaciers of Arctic/Antarctic rapidly melt?
Casteism
Well maybe we are above emmision limits or going there, but we are below the lower limit of expected temperature increase.
Global warming has paused.
Whether this is a momentary pause on a much larger graph or a real complete lapse in every single ipcc model remains to be seen. Bottom line something big here no scientist can explain with a high degree of confidence.
...because the really smart people who have a much better idea of what's going on in the world are a tiny minority.