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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.'"
Fuck that,
It was ready in the '80s when France did it.
Why isn't it ready now?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
That's a load of nonsense - the problem is that 10-15 years is too short a time-scale to make a reliable judgment. Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade. But it isn't a steady increase. If you look at the 15-year period up to 2006, the warming trend was almost twice as high as normal (namely 0.3 C per decade) but nobody cared much (except climate scientists and environmentalists). The 15-year period from 1998 to now has been slower than the trend, and that's got hugely more attention. The reason is that interest groups strongly push the latter, and want to ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda. See here for details
"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.
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
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.