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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.
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.
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
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.
We will consume less heating oil.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If your units are moles, then it is 1:1. If you are using weight, then yes, the CO2 weighs much more than the carbon burned, as O2 is quite heavy, and you get two of them added on. The ratio would be 1:3.7 in that case.
The formula tells you.
CO2 = 1 atom of carbon, two atoms of oxygen.
Carbon has atomic mass 12 (well, most of it). Oxygen has atomic mass 16.
If you burn 12 tonnes of carbon you'll take 32 tonnes of oxygen and produce 44 tonnes of CO2.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Dude, for the last time, you can't cite the crazy street hobo as a legitimate source.
Depending on which data set you use and which source, the US comes in around 12 per capita for carbon emissions. What's more, is that it has slowly decreased over the past 20+ years whereas many other companies have exploded upwards in the same time frame. Now, most of those countries with higher per capita emissions are much smaller countries than the US and we're still near or at the top of total emissions, but that doesn't change your crazy street hobo wrongness about per capita.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Why don't we ever get articles like this one on slashdot?
I would say "because it's bollocks", but that isn't a credible reason, many articles posted on slashdot are bollocks.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
One, but you're thinking of tons, not units.
If you take a pure carbon from the ground, that carbon is going to be 12 grams per mole. If you combine it with two oxygens, that's 12+16+16 = 44 grams per mole. So, one ton of C will produce (44/12) = 3.66 tons of CO2.
Not everything that's burned is pure carbon, but if you can figure out the relative atomic weight of the molecules you can get pretty close. And there are very complex functions (still being determined) as to how much of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere vs. being absorbed by increased photosynthesis, so that's not a direct map either.
And anybody please correct my rusty high school chemistry math.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
12th per capita, pre-ceeded by the economic power-houses of:
Quatar
Trinidad and Tobago
Dutch Antilles
Kuwait
Brunei
United Arab Emirates
Aruba
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Falkland Islands
Austtralia.
Ok, Australia is almost a real place, but the rest of them are jokes.
The EU average is less than half of US emissions per capita.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
And it shows the stupidity of ranking it this way.
China has ~1/3 the output per capita of the US. But 4x the capita. So it's actually putting out more. Even though it's not ranked in the top 50, per capita.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't say all Americans. In Georgia, we are seeing strange bedfellows (the Sierra club, the Greens, and the Tea Party) all banding together to push for solar energy. Here, solar has stopped being a "hippie" concept, and seeing mainstream use. In fact, solar is becoming a "why not" rather than a "why" question in building installs. One can even buy and wire up roof shingles (Dow Powerhouse is one example) now so one doesn't have to worry about panels.
One has to separate US citizens and residents from US businesses like Big Coal/Oil.
Even though the US lost its solar industry due to government inattention, individual Americans are building solar installations left and right, despite the fact that solar panels are imported. In a way it is good, since there are no-name MPPT controllers that are decent quality available very inexpensively.
No, solar isn't a cure-all (it mainly helps with the peak, and when off-grid, batteries don't last forever), but it is a lot better than more coal or natural gas plants.
Well yes, humans will survive, or at least a fair chunk of them. But the geopoltiical ramifications will be enormous. If previous climate shifts are any indication, we will see massive migrations as people try to get from where they're starving to where they think there is food. You will have wars and all the economic, political and social volatility that goes along with that. You will have nations that were previously capable of producing sufficient food to feed their population suddenly have to import, as rainbelts shift and previously arable land becomes arid land.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes. Carbon dioxide emissions have been generally dropping since around 2007. cite Some of that is due to the economic depression, but most is due to converting a significant number of coal power plants to natural gas. There are also many states that have required electrical utilities to produce a certain percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. For example, in Minnesota, 25% of electricity will be required to be from renewable sources by 2025. There are also higher nationwide fuel economy standards that are phasing in over a number of years, though vehicle emissions are relatively small compared to utilities/industry.
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
Actually, one scientist said if the trend from 2007 continued, there'd be no ice left sometime between 2013 and 2021. Of course, the trend from 2007 didn't continue, but even ignoring that, you'd have to wait 8 more years before you can do your victory dance because the warming isn't quite a bad as it could potentially be.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Too late.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Please keep facts out of here. This topic and space is for climate deniers who insist that the whole global warming thing is financially motivated. Don't you feel sorry for those poor starving petrochemical companies and their noble scientists?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.