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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.
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.
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.
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
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....
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.
Under no plausible scenario will greenhouse gas emissions cause humans to die out. At worst, rising temperatures will cause some short-term disruptions, migration, inconveniences, and costs.
Long term, even a complete melting of all ice caps (which would take a couple of thousand years), and global warming of several degrees Celsius, would result in a climate that's significant'y different from ours but is still quite nice (if not arguably nicer) for humans and mammals.
So if China was two countries, everything would be fine, since each country would only put out 2/3 of the C02 of the US, while maintaining their 1/3 output per capita. The way to solve climate change is obviously to divide up the big countries into smaller countries :)
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
Why don't we ever get articles like this one on slashdot?
Because it is solly based on a false premise.
Global warming has slowed since 1998 even though humans spewing ever more greenhouse gases are almost certainly to blame for damaging the atmosphere.
This statement is based on, they say a report summary...
That’s according to a 36-page summary of a report from a United Nations panel released in Stockholm today concluding Earth’s temperature since 1998 has increased at less than half the pace of longer-term averages since 1951.
... which they cleverly never cite directly or link to. Here is the link...
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf
The statement made by the article is never explicitely made in this report. On the contrary already on page 3, it is explained why a statement such as the one made in the article is, while true in a specific context, is missleading due to local variations in observed trends. If you look carfully at figure SPM-1 and the statement made on page SPM-3 (3), you will not only see that the author of the article missunderstood the statement made, but even inverted completly its interpretation and meaning.
The report states that the trend evaluate between 1998 and 2012 is slower thant the rate evaluate between 1951 and 2012. This trend variation is fully explained by a local change in temperature variation due to a strong El Nino over the 1960-1990 period and has nothing to do with global warming.
Ironically, the journalist missunderstood (deliberatly or not) the explanation why the use of local trend is missleading in understanding climate change and used the missleading trend stated as example of trend not to use to base is thesis on. I couldn't write "Wooooosh" loud enough.
And we should see more such nicely writte article on /. Yeah, that would be awesome.
Go read the report and learn something.
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