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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.'"
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
The rate of natural sequestration is so slow that for the purposes of planning within the next century, we can use a fixed amount. Technically you're correct but natural sequestration is hardly fast enough to be relevant to our civilization.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
No, the rate at which it's removed doesn't increase with increasing CO2, at least not enough to make a difference. Some additional carbon is stored in the oceans, possibly some increased biomass (but probably outweighed by deforestation?), but its pretty small in comparison to the amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels. And the amount is limited - the oceans are already turning slightly acidic.
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
"We'll be able to stop before the looming disaster actually happens, we're smart enough to see the key indicators and get out in time!"
Where have I heard this before? It was quite recently from another bunch of people who really should have known better and led us off a cliff into disaster because they just couldn't stop...
This isn't about science and hasn't been for a long time. It's about human nature. We don't like change, so when we've got an established way of doing things and no reason obvious enough in our daily lives to switch to a different way of doing things, we won't do it. In many cases, when we finally get it through our stupid thick heads that we need to change, it's far too late.
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
Expect to see more and more "un-natural" sequestration soon, as knowledge of manage intensive rotational grazing spreads among the peoples who inhabit damaged range lands. Allan Savory describes the process (along with some pretty amazing before & after photos) in this TED Talk: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change.
Definitely an "idea worth spreading."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
The panel only determined an upper limit for avoiding the worst of global warming... they never said anything about it being some kind of physical limit. How about a bad car analogy? If you're driving down the highway in an area with a lot of speed traps, 60mph might be the upper limit to avoiding speeding tickets. There's nothing preventing you from doing 80mph, but 60mph is roughly what you can expect to get away without any major consequences (IE: getting pulled over and ticketed). Now you can argue that we're more in control of a car than we are of global warming, but the truth is that we still have a fair bit of control over how much carbon is tossed into the atmosphere.
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
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.
The warming is not up for debate
The anthropogenic crowd keeps saying that. All science is up for debate all the time, you just need to present a better hypothesis. Saying "it's not up for debate" shows just how afraid you are of the weakness of your argument.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
This isn't about science and hasn't been for a long time. It's about human nature. We don't like change, so when we've got an established way of doing things and no reason obvious enough in our daily lives to switch to a different way of doing things, we won't do it. In many cases, when we finally get it through our stupid thick heads that we need to change, it's far too late.
What is clear is that changes are coming*. If we're not willing to change ourselves voluntarily then climate change and it's effects on the natural world will force change on us whether we want it or not. The choice is ours, proactively address the issue in a comprehensive fashion or let the natural changes drive us to address the effects piecemeal.
*To be honest the changes have already started but so far the effects are relatively small.
*To be honest the changes have already started but so far the effects are relatively small.
Really though we have a problem of the boiling frog principle. We'll bitch and moan that next year is hotter, colder, wetter, dryer, and more gloomy than the last depending on which area you're in but for the most part we won't care. It's getting warmer, time to upgrade the AC unit. It's getting colder better invest in a heater. Personally with the amount of flooding we've had in our area I've changed my renovation plans and raised my house of the ground.
We as a people will not react. I or you as a person will react, but we will react in a way that makes a measurable difference to your life. If you're uncomfortably hot you'll do something to cool you down and not go out and buy a Prius and sit around hoping some billion other people in the world make the same choice so that next year it'll be more comfortable.
In short as a species we're doomed. As a side note our newly elected government is about to repeal the carbon tax. Way to go forward in a country with one of the worst emission per capita figures...
There might be a way to spend a few tens of billions and end the use of fossil fuel by making a certain kind of renewable energy less expensive than fossil fuels. We could burn several times the current consumption of oil and not create any problems if it was carbon neutral synthetic made from really inexpensive electric power.
Dollar a gallon gasoline can be made from 1-2 cent electric power. Ground solar looks like it will bottom out around 8-10 cents per kWh. Space based solar power could get down to 1/5th of that because it gets 5 times as much sunlight in GEO. That's *IF* we can get the transport cost to GEO down to $100/kg. That's about a hundred to one reduction, but looks like it could happen. Details, including some spiffy artwork, here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/09/propulsion-lasers-for-large-scale.html
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain