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UN Report: Climate Changes Overwhelming
iONiUM (530420) writes "'The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned.' A document was released by the IPCC outlining the current affects on climate change, and they are not good. For specific effects on humans: 'Food security is highlighted as an area of significant concern. Crop yields for maize, rice and wheat are all hit in the period up to 2050, with around a tenth of projections showing losses over 25%.'"
The observed temperatures are currently below the error bars of the most optimistic projection. What does this mean?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Meanwhile, after you read past the end-of-the-world predictions that were likely lifted directly from one of those churches that makes a living predicting the End Times, here's a more realistic assessment from a real economist who told the IPCC to remove his name from their "summary":
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/...
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
One would think that agricultural lobbies worldwide, which are often quite politically powerful, would be screaming their heads off about climate change affecting crop yields. Have I simply failed to notice or have they been silent on the issue?
I have found one non-scientific observation about climate change conferences, which I am quoting in full: "I just Googled 'climate change conferences 2014': New York - Sep. Beijing - May. Peru - Dec Brazil - May. Iceland - Jun. Bonn - Mar. Las Vegas - Jul. Queensland - Sep/Oct. Venezuela - Nov. By then I got bored. It would appear that the best way to see the world on expenses and rack up plenty of air-miles is to become a 'Climate Change Expert'.
we're all effed. even if we do an aggressive CO2 reduction in emissions, we won't get emissions down to sustainable levels by 2050. Then, it will take decades for the CO2 air concentration to reach sustainable levels. and this assumes we don't get an explosion in emissions from developing countries.
So we have 80 years of unmitigated climate change ahead of us. pretty much everybody reading this will die before there's a possibility of things improving. sorry to be a debbie downer, but these are no longer dire warnings of what might happen unless we take action, they're explanations of what will happen due to past inaction. hide yo wife, hide yo kids, hide yo husbands, cuz things are gonna start changing.
Don't worry. Big Oil has assured me that these "scientific" studies are all hokum. We're fine. Please keep burning carbon fuels. Thanks.
Yeah! Mongol invasions over the ice bridge to Siberia! Like the GOOD OLD days!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is great, because it costs me a lot less to heat up my apartment than to cool it down.
I hate summer. Then again, I hate winter.
You could, you know, if you felt like, stop watching television read the report, and other associated materials.
I know, it's a lot of work, and it's just a lot easier to repeat what you've heard.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wow, the climate deniers are out in force on Slashdot today. Out of curiousity, are you paid? Do you all get instant alerts whenever the subject of climate is posted on Slashdot, like the Digg Patriots? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
I just hate my apartment.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I have always found it interesting that a lot of folks would prefer that such problems didn't exist when even simple logic seems to point to the fact that it is human caused. Common sense tells you that if a billion of us start to burn things it might have some negative effects. Heck, I remember as a kid we use to dig holes in a riverbank for fun and over time with a few sticks we managed to amazingly reshape the entire riverbank. Granted maybe I shouldn't be so hard on folks who refuse to believe in it. After all if it doesn't directly affect me and I can't do anything about it, it doesn't exist right?
The real problem is what to do about it. It probably isn't all gloom and doom. The UN is making a huge deal of it because let's face it there's a LOT of third world and poor countries out there where even a small shift in climate would kill millions. The UN represents ALL countries. For us richer nations it will probably be uncomfortable, maybe an inconvenience at worst so long as serious world war doesn't break out. Still I wonder how morally bad we would feel if we knew that say saving a little now could save millions in another country. Sadly I suspect in the end greed will win out and we'll likely take the difficult road in life. It seems to sadly be what we do best. Wait until things get bad or someone dies, then try to fix it if we can.
I happen to have some contacts that go fairly high. From what I gathered, at least some parts of the 1% have already given up on stopping climate change and have moved on to preparing for it, up to and including preparing to physically move.
So if you see the next draconian laws passed, or wonder why our military is being propped up much more than we need, ask yourself if it might be for the future, not the now.
(posting anon for obvious reasons)
The UN keeps arguing how it will be a disaster for everyone but almost sadly it won't be. What's going to happen is that poor populous nations are going to be affected worst. The refugees will try to move to wealthier areas like China, Europe, or the US, who's industrial farming and infrastructure can keep up with the changes. If the situation gets as bad as the UN claims the flow of refugees will turn into a flood, borders will be closed, and the poor affected by climate change are going to die. I hate to say it but no nation is going to endanger their citizens to allow millions of starving refugees in, even if it means watching them die on the doorstep. Anyone who thinks the industrial nations wouldn't use force to keep refugees out is sadly mistaken. Meanwhile it will be mostly business as usual in the industrialized world but with some extra seawalls.
Well, the report says the effects are irreversible, so does this mean we can finally stop worrying about it now?
I wonder how many corporations are already looking to make a ton of money if the environment does collapse. Look for billionaires investing in water reservoirs, fishing farms, algae growing technology. They are counting on the deaths of hundreds of millions. Where there's death, there's profit!
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Dont enrich the private bankers and the Rothschild's with their carbon credit schemes any further
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqNds9pNuI
Slashdot must be getting a check from a Rothschild/Banker subsidiary, running these stories by totally discredited scientific organizations. It's like slashdot totally ignored the fact that the IPCC are complete liars.
But if you repeat a lie enough people will believe it.
Haha, you can't teach a fool! There will always be people that just don't get it. Most have been mind poisoned by the Koch bros, and of that lot, some believe the earth is flat and only 6k years old. Why bother debating with them. The concerning thing is that the brainwashed do not realize their condition. The evidence, even for laymen is beyond reproach at this point.
Please define exactly what percentage of climate change is man made and what percentage is non man made.
the climate change conspiracy theorists are out in force today
nuclear winter in north Korea may also happen
We just had the first winter in the midwest that was even remotely close to our norm in 26 years.
That's right, 26 years, 1 "normal" winter.
We'll finally have the right amount of ground moisture for crops after having near drought conditions for years.
We'll finally see our water tables rise more than a smidge this spring.
Hoping we don't have another record high summer that will destroy the crops.
Go head, naysay all you want while making money hand over fist - fat lot of good that money will do you when you can't go out and grow a crop on your own now will it?
If it keeps going, only the farmers will eat, all you fatcats will starve to death unless you figure out how to eat money.
Assuming the projections are correct, wouldn't it make sense to eliminate using maize (corn in the US) as an additive to gasoline? When 30%+ of the corn currently being planted in the US is done so to get the Ethanol subsidy, it removes quite a bit from the food supply. I do not claim that all would be planted for food (corn price would plummet), but arable land is being used to for this 'not green' fuel additive. I say 'not green' because even the UN has acknowledged that the use is counterproductive.
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
"If you continuously prophesy gloom, you will eventually be correct".
"If you continuously prophesy spoon, you will eventually be correct".
"If you continuously prophesy loom, you will eventually be correct".
Get over it. Lean to tell the difference between a prediction based on evidence and a prophesy based on wishful thinking.
What about all the evidence mounting that the statistics and data used were being fudged by the very scientists touting the problem. Not much of it is standing up to impartial peer review, and anyone who dares mention that is blasted into silence or ridiculed into exiting the debate. Hell, how about the fact that it was the coldest fucking winter I remember in my 40-years. but go ahead and tell me how Manhattan will be underwater when I'm ready to retire, I like fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqNds9pNuI
I've always been more pro-science than many, but I'm still not buying the alarming projections for several reasons.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
What studies have falsified it? JEsus fucking christ, pal, some fucking blogger you frequent doesn't constitute a "study".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yea, just like the 30 year old man who says his current height is the greatest in the past two decades.
But he is not growing at all in the current year.
Typical alarmist phrasing to try and get around the inconvenient fact that the global temperatures have been FLAT of declining for the past 13-17 years depending on which of the temperature series you look at.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/31/dataset-of-datasets-shows-no-warming-this-millennium/
And the land based temperature records have been heavily "adjusted" to make the warming looks worse (by lowering past readings).
The jig is up, the warming never got to the levels predicted by the alarmist models, so the basis for a lot of the scare is losing credibility fast.
The alarmists are becoming increasingly shrill as they realize the people are waking up to their "hide the decline" methods. They try and scare people with weather, when storms, droughts, tornadoes have always been with us, and show NO sign of increasing for anyone who wants to look at real data. Seal level is rising, but not accelerating over the trend that has been going on for centuries. Humans are good at adapting to that kind of stuff.
A bit of warming is good for humans, and the UN reports often try and minimize the benefits.
I understand that you still think AGW isn't a religion. I respectfully disagree.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not to mention all his wanna-be ripoffs on various talk radio outlets. I can practically hear the frothy apoplexy dripping from my speakers.
Tell these guys! Highly Significant indeed
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
These people need a Western Civilization History lesson.
Look at the list on Wikipedia of European (and by extension the Americas) that occurred during the Little Ice Age:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1500–1799.
To say that rising global near-surface temperature pushes humans into engaging in wars is false.
Why to people in Mexico and Spain take a mid-day siesta ? Duh ! To damn hot to work !
Yet another epic fail from the IPCC-naughts following their misunderstanding of the "Gas Law" commonly written as PV = nRT. When factored we can write it as n = PV/RT and in derivative form dn = 1/R * d(PV)/dT i.e. a change in the molar concentration of a substance [CO2] is INVERSELY proportional to the change of Temperature ! Duh !
Epic fail IPCC-naughts !
Ha ha LOL
Crop yields for maize, rice and wheat are all hit in the period up to 2050
You mean the crop that we have SO LITTLE USE FOR that we actually turn it into a motor fuel in a energy-negative process? Oh noes...
I think you're a bit confused about the precise meaning of the term "self-fulfilling prophecy". Also, "Radical left-wing UN types" is laughable; the thing the UN is most often blamed for (from all sides) is being too diplomatic and not radical enough. The second most commonly heard blame is "too powerless", so so much for your "ability to fuck up our food supply". Finally, it's a false comparison; contrary to fossil fuel industry FUD, AGW is based on solid science that is well-understood for decades. But hey, thanks for playing.
Captcha: disgusts.
there's a LOT of third world and poor countries out there where even a small shift in climate would kill millions.
How do you come to that conclusion - we are looking at a degree or two of change over a HUNDRED YEARS. That's not even enough that plat or animal life would fail to adapt to over five years, much less one hundred.
Mankind especially is very good at adapting to even quite sudden changes in climate, as are animals. They will move between regions, they will adapt to conditions. Areas naturally see drought and wet years over the lifespans of animals, they have to be able to deal with that - so they can also adapt to an overall change as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Radical right-wing Christians believe in the Apocalypse"
Uh... way to conflate completely different things. You give your own biases away.
Many Christians believe in the Apocalypse. It has nothing to do with being right wing. (Correlation does not imply causation, remember.) There are plenty of Leftist Christians.
By the way, in case you didn't know: the word "apocalypse" means "revelation", and while it is popularly used this way, it actually has nothing to do with disaster. You're probably thinking of Armageddon, which is a different thing entirely.
First it was the military industrial complex, then the security industrial complex and now we are getting rogered by the climate-change industrial complex. Each had their boogeyman, each said 'we'll save you' and all were/are nothing but hot air so they can take my money.
Our food crops are all massively bio-engineered.
And you are claiming that with temperature changes of 1-2c over 100 years, there is not enough time to bio-engineer new strains that like it slightly warmer?
it was bred selectively for thousands of years.
Across many different climates, so you can just start growing strains from the climates warmer than the region you are in now - or over 100 years, just create some new strains. 100 years is plenty of time to do so naturally, even if you did want to discount doing so artificially (and frankly I think that's kind of insane given it's a more targeted and quicker change).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While it's true that without human modification of the environment we would probably be living in an ice age, there HAS been human modification of the environment, dating back at least to the first rice paddy.
I don't know who said that trees were giving way to grasses because of low CO2 levels. I suspect you misheard what was said. That's more likely to be due to levels of rain decreasing. (Levels of CO2 have been increasing all over the globe throughout at least the last two centuries. To be more specific I'd need to look up studies.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Nicely said, and thanks for the link.
I have full faith in human nature... we will do absolutely nothing about climate change, resource depletion (especially water), growing pollution problems, etc, until the consequences of any of them are bashing us repeatedly in the face with a 4x4, at which point stupid fire apes might actually get the concept that you can only trash everything around you for so long before it comes back to bite you.
It's what stupid short-sighted fire apes do. It's in their nature.
it appears to me there's good money to be made in solar power and electric cars. A business case for more wind turbines could make someone very rich.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Was it one of those shows about aliens building the pyramids?
I explicitly modified Christian with "right-wing" for that very reason. You've simply substituted my "right-wing Christians" with "Christians" which is some form of logical fallacy, straw-man seems like the best fit; but I'm not sure and don't really care that much since this really is a religious debate and nobody's mind will change.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.
Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
TODO create witty sig.
it's a 11 year cycle. Important to know, but in no way is it an argument against global warming.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's been a lot hotter here in the past, it's been a lot cooler here in the past. I remember the seventies; the scientific consensus was that air pollution was increasing the Earth's albedo, thereby causing global cooling. Snowball Earth was the inevitable result, and there was a lot of panic on the subject.
Two questions, then. 1) Is global warming the result of humankind's actions on the planet, and 2) regardless of the answer to #1, is there anything humankind can do about it?
"the brainwashed do not realize their condition" Oh the irony ...
It's hard to tell - is this a parody of the lying/ignorant climate change denier, making up 80- and 200-year cycles out of the blue? The only scientifically accepted cycle is the 11-year one, and it is disconnected from AGW (or did you really think climate scientists didn't know about something so basic)?
You mean This link from the Wall Street Journal giving a more reasoned overview of the report?
The one that people calling others "deniers" are censoring so the world cannot see it?
That is a good link. Good enough to try and bury it would seem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See, that's the major problem. Every big storm, every bad drought, every huge tornado, is said to be evidence of global warming. In fact, only a few, or maybe none, is actually a result -- we've had bad weather before. (That's not to say you are wrong.) When you trumpet every bad thing that happens as evidence of global warming, you overplay your hand and start sounding like Chicken Little, especially when you sneeringly dismiss your opponents points as ignorant or stupid. (Even if they are.) My old granny used to say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Tell the truth as it is, without opinion or embellishment. And if you can't do that, shut up! You are damaging the Cause.
It's absurd to equate a small shift in temperature over 100 years to an abrupt transition to the vacuum of space. There are lots of reasons to think the first world might send a lot more aid to those countries over the next 100 years, or they simply improve themselves (as some places in Africa are).
You also seem to ignore that most starvation in Africa is caused by politics, not climate issues of any kind. Botswana was a fertle country - without any shift in climate it was changed to a wasteland where people are eating rats (if they can find any left).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't remember the last time I wished some underpaid midwestern sysadmin could explain climate change (or lack thereof to me)
Whatever is true the majority of the climate change industry and powers that be must not be too concerned. Why else would they keep banging their head on a primarily ascetic solution that has been proven not to work? Whatever they claim to believe countries simply will not accept the standards the IPCC wants, will fail to meet the standards they accept, or offload industry on countries that have no standards. And many say that we're all doomed anyway. This has been shown time and time again. Yet they keep pushing these failed tactics of economic downsizing and regulation that will coincidentally enrich and empower them while at the same time virtually ignoring, actively blocking, or only paying lipservice to nuclear and technological solutions.
It isn't, by the very definition of the word "religion".
Disagreement with a basic fact of language isn't a very good basis for an argument, respectful or not.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Perhaps it would, if they said that. Which of course they didn't.
But then again, of course we are all going to die, that's the essence of the human condition.
Climate change deniers, though, want to live suboptimally so that large corporations can have bigger yacht parties.
Acknowledging climate change would mean allowing disruptive change, which would mean the little guy would have a chance against the entrenched brown power structure. But that's not on the agenda, because the climate change deniers are too busy suckling at Monsanto's engorged corporate reproductive organ. We've gone from a market ideology that acknowledged greed exists (regulated capitalism) to one that rewards the most amoral greed (corporate feudalism).
Semantics. Slow down Cowboy, Slashdot hates pithy comebacks. Anyway, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. I can readily identify priests, temples, dogma and followers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
First of all, I didn't read the summary or anything. I don't care what evidence points to what or whether A or B claim, demand or deny something. I can't help to look at it from a risk manager's point of view and, frankly, I wonder what the goal of the discussion is. Currently it feels like a political debate between two positions claiming that they're right, but no longer because they think they have the better position but only because they don't wanna relent and WANNA be right, no matter whether that has anything to do with reality or not.
At the same time, I can't help but not care who is right in the end. Because from the risk management point of view, it simply does not matter. As a risk manager, I would HAVE TO assume that global warming happens and that I have to prepare for it and formulate a plan to mitigate its effects. Why? Because of risk * cost / reward. In this case (and I get to that in a minute), cost and reward even take a back seat because risk itself outshines both.
Risk is determined by effect (what happens when the incident strikes) and chance (how likely is it that it happens). The risk is in this case paramount due to the insanely high effect and a nonzero chance of incidence. In risk management terms, an incident would threaten the continuation of operation (in this case, our life), costing at the very least millions if not billions of lives, followed by famine and very likely war for the remaining resources for the rest of the planet. Now, this would not matter yet if there is a zero chance of incidence. That is nothing I could assume for certain.
The mere fact that there is a nonzero chance of it to happen, coupled with the insanely severe effects in case of incidence, would make me recommend to prepare for the incident and at least conduct studies how it could be avoided.
The key issue here is that the incident cannot be mitigated sensibly once it happened. We can't react to it appropriately, we can only prepare for it. To pull a drastic example, once you have lung cancer, stopping smoking won't change much anymore. And I'm pretty sure you don't give a shit then whether smoking gave you cancer or whether you got it any other way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep. And if there's one thing the current powers do not want, it's more people getting rich.
This is what it's really all about.
But why can't the government invest into a giant solar air purifier or the very least a study on this. They spend money on stuff that is actually crap; why prisoners try to break out of prison. Wouldn't such a thing take care of this problem? Maybe even something that cleans itself by dipping itself into the ocean....I know its bit crazy on my part but I can see this working....
It also does not change the fact that climate change of even 2c over 100 years will not make Botswana worse or better for the people who live there. It doesn't matter if it's more arid or more rainy when all your farms have failed and gone fallow, and are maintained in the state on purpose.
Only political change will help.
As for being on the knifes edge, they are way past that. The knife is cutting deep already. Quite a lot of have died.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yeah I'll hide my signed floats if I were you.
1) We haven't been observing the sun for long enough to know whether a 200 year cycle exists.
2) We haven't been observing the sun for long enough to know whether the 80 year cycle is real or just a statistical aberration
3) The 11 year cycle is real, but presence or lack of sunspots has very little to no effect on Earth's weather.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Just now.....all my friends on Facebook are exclaiming and asking what can they burn to help global warming.
Go figure...
http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/obrienj/poetry/hanrahan.html
It may be colder than normal in some specific places (like the eastern part of the United States). In spite of that, worldwide temperatures are way above average (NASA released a report recently saying 2013 was one of the warmest years on record and every year in the top-10 was in the last 15 years).
The problem here that people are failing repeatedly to grasp is that science does not actually have an overarching "THEY" who will police the system and prevent rubbish papers being published. Science works on peer review, meaning that the peers (i.e. other scientists in the same field) of the person submitting the paper get to police what is written in the paper. This works if the peers are more or less skeptical, and fails badly if most peers either subscribe to or have a vested interest in supporting a set world-view. In the case of climatologists, a prophesy of doom is just what is needed to keep the grant money rolling in, hence there is a presumption that any paper that agrees with this orthodoxy must be correct.
The second bug in the system is how research is funded. Research grants typically fund a post-doctoral researcher (a person who has taken a degree and a doctorate in the subject) to work on the topic for three years. Typically this means a year to work out how to do the work, a year to actually achieve something and a year of blowing one's own trumpet to try to secure another post-doc posting. This is, as you might imagine, an inefficient way to fund research.
The third bug in the system is a lack of research support for climatologists. To be a good climatologist you have to know a lot of physics, a good deal of mathematics and a smattering of biology, meteorology and so on to actually have a vague clue how a climate system works. To model climate you need a doctoral-grade level of skill in quite sophisticated programming, including how best to use massively parallel machines. If instead of looking at the emails from the University of East Anglia leak you go and look at the code, and the HARRY_README file, then you see how this is working or rather not working in practice. The UoEA code was mostly cobol. Mostly, because Cobol sucks rather for manipulating strings; the coder used shell calls to handle these bits. You or I would likely use Perl or Python to do the same thing and would make a much better job of it, but the coder in the UoEA case was self-taught. Two words that ought to send a shudder through anyone tasked with debugging and maintaining code: Self. Taught.
That code was a mess. A complete and utter dog's dinner. The original coder was learning by making mistakes, the sorts of mistakes that get drummed out of newbie coders in their first year of a degree. Things like a sub-program failing silently, instead of screaming blue murder on STDERR, for instance. Things like not keeping adequate backups. The UoEA lost their input raw data, because they didn't have enough storage. Once the raw data was gone, they had no way to start again from scratch.
Climatology is like particle physics was fifty years ago. Particle physicists started off as jacks of all trades, and very quickly realised that an army of engineers and computer techies was needed to support a few researchers. Climatologists have yet to quite realise that they need a small army of coders and computer sysadmins to provide them with the kit and the code to run their simulations, and no, this support cannot be done by the hired help on a shoestring. Until they realise this, we will not be able to trust their results.
In fact, a great many have expressed a) doubts regarding this being the hottest period on record or b) doubts that it is caused by man.
That said, try to say that in the government grant funded, let's get ourselves an international tax (because that is REQUIRED before you can have an international army). Go check out the relationship between we these United States and the Federal Government which usurped the states on many levels.
One thing you'll notice. The Federal government gain accesses to taxes, the more and more access to taxes the Federal government received, all while the states received less access. The result is what we have today, the Federal government wields most all of the power.
How long do you think the UN with a tax base would last before it formed a security defense force? How long until it needed more taxes to support the ever increasing peace keeping missions? how long until the first UN draft of young men for war?
Oh, and remember, the UN has neither the protections of human rights that America and most of Europe has, nor does it have a democratic foundation. In the UN a tyrant like Gaddafi has equal rights to the entire nation and continent and democratically elected government of Australia. That is SCARY!!!!
Who has more money riding on math than economists?
It's faster. We could make plied bamboo 2x4 replacements. Have a building boom.
And so has the the Tea Party...
You can ALWAYS find someone more to the extreme. Heck, even the KKK protested and opposed the Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptists.
I remember 6 billion would be an impossible threshold. The world would have had a global collapse. I believe there were some who said the same of 1 billion. We'll probably soon be at 10 billion.
I am always surprised when sci-fi shows exclaim that some destroyed planet had millions, or 300 million inhabitants.
Really, cause I just once want to here "There were 200 billion people on that planet."
Pretty much all those who claim to be, and have any age under their belt, wear other degrees. Physics, specialties on atmospheric physics, geology, meteorology, climatology (regional climate evaluation), etc.
Oh as for those economists, some of which have taken some of the highest aspects of statistics. They tend to be EXTREMELY qualified at evaluation of the methods used for reaching conclusions. Realize, these are the guys who have billions of dollars riding on their statistics conclusions.
Warmer temperatures mean far more humidity, moisture, and the rescinding of deserts. The highest desertification periods in earth's history are often during the ice ages, when so much of the earth's moisture and water content has been frozen.
Let me exemplify. When do you need a humidifier in Connecticut? Is it during the warm muggy summer or the dry winter?
In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming.
Never? That is absolutely false. First, it was denying climate change was actually happening. Then, when that didn't work due to overwhelming evidence, it was okay, climate change is happening, but it couldn't possibly be caused by humans. Then, when that didn't work due to overwhelming evidence, it's now become okay, climate change is clearly happening and clearly caused by humans, but the effects don't matter. The next step we'll probably be, yep, climate change is happening, it's caused by human, the effects will soon be serious, but if we invest resources into making it better then the owners of this news conglomerate won't be quite as filthy rich, so why not just let the next generation worry about it?
NO research is immune from meddling by sponsors, if your sponsor does not like it - you are outta there, or at least exposed to their frowns.
To claim that any sponsor is altruistic and will keep forking over cash no matter what you do is, at best, a roll of the dice.
The claim that the only "good sponsors" are government and environmental groups just demonstrates that you really are not paying attention to past research horrors funded by these entities.
Science, regardless of funding source, will slog thru to the truth eventually - you just cant be in a big hurry.
"Really, the sky is falling! Really truly, we mean it this time. Don't pay attention to the previous reports that predicted the end of glaciers, an ice-free arctic, etc by around now, we were slightly off. But this time, we're absolutely positive the sky is falling.
Really.
Seriously."
-Styopa
One of the things that came out of the diplomatic cable leaks was the concern diplomats had for the mass migration the 2009-10 drought was causing, 10% of Syria's population simply abandoned the rural area due to lack of water and sought refuge in the cities. One US diplomat even correctly identified where the social strain would reach flashpoint. The fact there was an unprecedented regional drought with widespread food riots just prior to the "Arab spring" seems to have escaped people notice. The obvious cause-effect link between food shortages, internal displacement, and civil unrest seems to be lost in the noise of a bitter civil war and tens (if not hundreds) of millions of disillusioned revolutionaries now enduring the "Arab summer".
Sure it's silly to blame an historic drought and subsequent civil unrest on AGW alone, the point is not that "AGW caused the civil war or toppled Mubarak", the point is that such "dustbowl" scenarios are much more likely to occur with AGW than without it. The issue of "climate refugees" is why for almost a decade now the pentagon has put AGW at the top of it's medium term future threat list.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"I explicitly modified Christian with "right-wing" for that very reason. You've simply substituted my "right-wing Christians" with "Christians" which is some form of logical fallacy, straw-man seems like the best fit; but I'm not sure and don't really care that much since this really is a religious debate and nobody's mind will change."
Pardon me... my own mistake. I was confusing part of what you wrote about right-wing with part of what someone else wrote. Mea culpa.
"You would think there are enough math geeks who would be able to see the vast amount of BS the GW people are putting out, but since they hide the raw data and have no way of adjusting for varying albedo at ground stations we just have to go by the fudged data."
This is simply and completely wrong. The data sets are OK and there is numerous adjustments & corrections applied.
Remember the Berkeley statistician who was a skeptic about the data quality & reduction procedures for various reasons? Well, he did what you said was impossible: he got the not-actually-hidden raw data, and with some colleagues re-did everything. The conclusion? The climatologists were right all along and didn't screw anything up.
And why would thousands of scientists all over the world suddenly and nearly uniformly "want" a specific outcome?
And if it's all just a giant magic trick for "moar funding!!!!" somehow maintained across generations and countries why hasn't this happened in any other area of science? And if it's all a scam, why choose one which would be opposed by many of the most powerful forces on the planet?
The ones who really "want a specific outcome" are actually the other side, for obvious reasons.
The US can always pay the interest on its loans denominated in US dollars by making dollars.
In any case, in 2013, the current interest on the US debt is about 400 billion USD. The US GDP is 16,803 billion USD, so the interest payment is about 2.3% of GDP. The US GDP could go down a bunch further.
This is a completely different situation from actually changing the global composition of physical molecules in the atmosphere, which cannot be redefined by any human action. The risk of long-term nearly irreversible changes in the physical environment vs human-to-human financial contracts?
That was, as the quote states, never the real debate. The scientific debate is between those who don't think the rate of increase is harmful, and those who think it is - but time and data have not been kind to the evangelical data-deniers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mea culpa.
Rare bird sighted on the Internet! Thank-you for the courtesy. It really does mean a lot.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Finally! The science is settled, global warming, er... global cooling, er... climate change is "severe, pervasive and irreversible". Now we can do away with all the costly environmental and carbon-count related regulations. No point in re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
A government panel calls for more government control over society due to the crisis of the day.
all agree!!! Unfortunately they all speak with the voice of the same one person. But this IPCC gang has managed to publish the same claims under the letterheads of all the otherwise-credibly organizations. IPCC are not more scientists than Paul Krugman is an economist. They are all nothing but political shills who needs to be derided and dismissed much more often than they are.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If 90% of us drop dead, that would actually help quite a bit more than any conservation efforts. Aggressive birth control comes in a strong second for effectiveness in the medium (20-40 year) term.
If you take the historical view of humanity's behavior, you'd come to the conclusion that the 1970s were an anomaly, we should have had WW-III, then we'd be dealing with nuclear winter, potentially an ice age, instead of runaway CO2 production.
Either way, we're facing yet another of nature's challenges, whether we as a species are smart enough to achieve a soft transition remains to be seen. Personally, if we can get over the nationalistic and personal competitiveness and lust to control as much as "humanly" possible, I think there's a chance for a soft landing along these lines:
http://5050by2150.wordpress.co...
Thank you. Yes, I would prefer gills to paying a carbon tax to the same psychiatric patients that pushed coal and oil deregulation through lobbying etc. it's all their fault anyway. Don't let these dogs guilt you.
We often talk about from 2000 but someone smiles. Oneday our planet will destroy. Help the earth, help me.!!!
Sam,
From http://bcfamilytour.com
http://tour.bcgroup.vn
Corn ethanol is, in simplest terms, stupid. You are growing a biomass which requires constant fuel and fertilizer and pesticides to tend, in order to turn a single-digit-percentage of that biomass into fuel. But the first US presidential primary is in Iowa, aka corn territory. Which means given the choice of trying to put this monstrosity down or fight Zombie Dracula with your bare hands, you'd have better odds with Dracula.
The other elephant, or rather cow, in the room is meat consumption. The cost in water and land to grow one single patty's worth of meat for a burger is mind boggling. It takes over a ton of feed and over ten thousand gallons of water to make a single pound of meat. If California stopped growing alfalfa to feed cows, their water problems would vanish into thin air.
The problem is how do we slow down the American CO2 emissions machine to 50% or less?
The basics are still waiting to be acted on:
1. A carbon tax on all extracted minerals combined with an equivalent offshore emission carbon tax on imported manufactured goods.
2. Ride sharing everywhere all of the time for a 50% passenger vehicle load factor.
3. A recalibration of the economically appropriate commute to 1/3 the present distance.
4. Cut the total carbon from all airplanes, cars and ships to 1/3 the present level. Start with 30 days a year of petroleum vehicle holidays.
A "holiday" approach raises problems with vehicle loans and owners who feel compelled to use the vehicles in order to pay off the loans. What is needed here is a way to address this financial pressure that forces the owner to use the vehicle. Long haul truck drivers with monthly bills for the truck and it's fuel are under enormous pressure to drive as much as they can. What I point out is financial pressure is a major force driving CO2 emission. We need to address this conflict if we are going to have a widely acceptable slow down method.
5. Explore ways to "slow down America" by reducing the level of American personal and business debt. Capture some of the money not spent on fuel and push American home purchase costs down so a one wage earner schoolteacher who rides a bike to school can buy a house and pay it off in 16 years.
6. Drive down home energy usage with a powerful home improvement strategy. The typical 50 year home should get a 100 year roof, a 20x30 garden, shearwall, a solar heating atrium, and 3kw solar electricity and 1 kw solar hot water and still resell for the 2014 equivalent of $350K for the next 3 generationss of home owners.
Once again the chicken littles are coming and squaking at us about the environment. This while refusing to carry cloth bags, driving-- whether electric or gasoline, instead of walking or biking or even using public transportation. Some even burn more fuel in a day that many of us will burn in the rest of our lives, on their private jets.
I didn't believe you in the past. I was right not to believe you in the past. I don't believe you now. Of what I've seen of you, you are composed of two types: oportunistic liars, and their "useful idiots". Guess what? I probably won't believe you in the future. So go away and squack someplace else.
C'mon, I would prefer if the report was just another April Fools' Day joke...
nuclear winter in north Korea may also happen
Unless I'm mistaken, (anyone?) nuclear winter isn't a localised phenomenon.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Don't tell me what I personally remember from my own life experience was a myth. Wikipedia article notwithstanding, I remember quite clearly the debates, public reporting. To be sure, I see more credible evidence to support the current theories regarding global warming, but take my word for it - global cooling was a very big concern back in the seventies.
Why do they continue to beat this dead-horse. Everyone knows its complete and utter BS. It's been proven to be BS by several studies - yet the media continues to trumpet it for those too young to remember all of the hulabuloo about the Impending Ice-Age back in the 70's - now instead of "Global Warming" it's "Climate Change"
Interestingly if you dust off a gloom and doom report from the 1970s you can even find some similar trhings to in the modern versions. Though IIRC some of the same people are involved.
- well, the climate had been changing for the last 4.3 billion years and will continue to do so without any help from humans.
If anyone deserves the title of "denier" it's those who deny that Earth's climate has always changed, sometimes very radically, long before there were any humans around.
We are like a pimple on an ant's butt... When it comes to our effect on how, when, and to what extent the climate will change...
Humans certainly can change local weather and thus have some effect on climate systems. So do many other animals. Diverting rivers or building cities are far more likely top human significent human activities though.
Is he right? I don't know. But whoever modded him "Troll" should be really fucking ashamed of themselves.
lllll AJ
Real geeks love a good fight over scientific interpretations.
Rather obviously it is not possible to have a serious discussion about climate science with anyone who would use a term such as "global warming alarmists" to describe the profession. Real geeks prefer arguing with people whose position has some basis in fact and which addresses the real points of contention in the science as it stands.
"some believe the earth is flat and only 6k years old" - fortunately those idiots can be mostly ignored as they are not really dangerous but climate sceptics are idiots and potentially dangerous to the planet
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I mean the idea that global cooling was a serious concern in the science community in the 70s is a myth. I was there too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
if you insulated it properly then cooling as well as heating would be cheaper
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You are assuming the "new" land is suitable for crops to grow. Huge swathes of it have had their topsoil removed by glaciation, meaning they will be woefully underproductive, if at all productive. Also those new areas are currently frozen tundra, which have a nasty habit of releasing methane when heated up, which is an even worse greenhouse gas. If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know this.
The real horror of this story is that the amount of money lost to billionaires that keep promoting this BS and line their pockets with the money from the fools who buy into this 'fear machine'.
What always annoys me about environmentalists, is that they always propose going back to the horse and cart, rather than tackling the real issue, which is massive overpopulation.
Perhaps a licence to have children would be the best idea. It should not be a right, to reproduce. You should have the means to support your offspring properly, without them suffering massively, as a result of resource shortages.
In the case of some nations, this will mean a massive drop in population, and a massive drop in the need for foreign aid. Having children when you are living in poverty, is grossly irresponsible. Those responsible for encouraging it (eg. the church of catholicism), should be prosecuted / closed down.
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/ccr2b/pdf/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf
I think this is more reasonable.
The sky is not falling.
Scenario C: The "global climate change" is part of the natural cycle and we humans have changed it slightly (in geological terms, think millions of years, not hundreds). We then go about trying to slow this process down and totally f*ck our planet because we don't know what we are doing.
Stop suggesting that I said we would grow corn 2'000 miles north of where we do now. All of global warming is talking about a change of 5 degrees or less. That's about 100 to 200 miles north. We've got plenty of people living all the way up. We're a well-off country, and we've plenty of top-soil. It's not difficult to carry it with us north 100 miles to new pastures. Welcome to new real estate opening up. The nicer it is -- in terms of temperature -- the more readily people will move there. Then they'll be talking about humans as the life-supporting teraformers of earth: able to expedite converting tundra into lucious pasture.
And if you knew what you were talking about, you'd think one step further. It takes two years for top soil to appear on a landscape once the temperature is suitable. It's tundra because it's cold. If it weren't cold, it wouldn't be tundra for very long.
Global warming from carbon debunked: NASA report verifies carbon dioxide actually cools atmosphere Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/040448_solar_radiation_global_warming_debunked.html
Here's what I don't understand. Why do people who so vehemently deny current scientific research always bring up the issue that they're insulted by being called "deniers"? Seriously, they're "denying," all right, and the word itself is relatively neutral. Now if I was calling them "morons," "trailer trash," "agenda-driven obsessive Liberal-hating ignoramuses," or "Glenn Beck dittomouths," OK, that would be something to be offended about. But "denier"?? Why keep bringing this up? All it does is make the denier look embarrassed or guilty about his position.
Although I still have to wonder about the emotional health or intellectual honesty of a person who believes that there's been a global conspiracy among every government in the industrialized world, every National Science Foundation, every credible peer-reviewed journal around the world that publishes in three major fields of science, tens or hundreds of thousands of scientists around the work who perform research in those field (likely well in excess of 95% of those working in those fields), and virtually every academic institution in the world that has departments dedicated to any of those three fields. And, worse, that this conspiracy has existed for over 20 years without a single credible dissenter, and has existed among entities who would rather shoot themselves in the head than agree with each other. And that, not only is there no motivation for such a conspiracy, but that there is tremendous motivation _against_ holding such beliefs, which lead to a conclusion that economic expenditures are necessary that will be great enough to bring down national governments. (See, e.g., the Marshall Islands or Australia.)
Haviing said all that, I think I've convinced myself t hat "denier" may indeed be an inaccurate term. "Fucking idiot" seems better.
Seriously, why is anybody even discussing this issue with these guys?? You're just enabling them.
So the foot of ice in my yard , in April is supposed to make me believe them how?
The same old FAILED stuff from the IPCC. They have not had a correct prediction in 20+ years! Their models, on which they base everything, can only hindcast correctly with hundreds of "adjustments".
If your theory/model and reality don't match, your theory/model is WRONG. Modify or abandon your theory/model.
So here is the question for everyone who thinks CO2 is the control knob of Earth's climate: How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit that CO2 doesn't control the climate? 20 years? 30? 50? Never?
Compare that with the predictions from Dr Libby & Pandolfi from the 1970s! 30+ years of accurately calling the climate is hard to beat and I hope they were wrong about what comes next (1-2 degree F drop with the outside chance of a 3-4 degree F drop).
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/1979-before-the-hockey-team-destroyed-climate-science/
That would be total disaster for crops as a colder world is a drier world.
When you are at the top of a sine wave you are getting warm temperatures but that doesn't mean they will continue. Dr Easterbrook correctly called this cooling of the pacific back in 1999. The oceans give up their heat slowly but once done it gets cold and stays that way until they warm up again. We are in for 20+ years of colder temperatures before the PDO switches back and we start to warm.
So in 5-10-15-20 years we will see who is correct. Dr Easterbrook, who has been correct for 12 years, or the IPCC who has been wrong for 20.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
I have a new tool when talking to deniers. I just use one word. RISK! Risk as a concept is well educated in American society.. EX-Smokers reduce their RISK of lung cancer for every year they are an EX-Smoker... So, if we talk about climate change and RISK it becomes very easy to bridge the topics... such as the RISK of invasive species spreading into new areas. http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/topi...
And, of course, you've checked all this land to make sure it's good for growing corn, and that it will get adequate water under most likely scenarios. There's lots of things that affect arable land besides temperature.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Perhaps you aren't familiar with just how much land we're talking about. I don't need to have checked it all. I need to have found more of it than is currently used. Yes. Yes I have. Remembering that currently we don't use even 1% of what's above it. For every degree of climate change, we get basically triple what we have currently. And again, people carry things.
The worst thing about climate change for scientists is that people will lose interest in it.
Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.
Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Absolutely. Because of you think about it, captains of industry, the WSJ target readership, can't do their jobs on the basis of fantasy. And, they're not the type to form opinions by reading anybody's editorials anyway, so there's no confusIon for them. Whereas the guys who happily parrot the WSJ editorials here are not usually professionally confronted with reinsurance costs for meteorological disasters, or whatever the actual news item covers.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
No, it doesn't follow that more land at a given temperature is better for growing than less land, elsewhere, at a given temperature. Soil quality and water supply matter a whole lot, also.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Soil quality and water supply follow humans -- and we have infinite water supply around here, especially going north. We can carry soil. Greenhouses are easy solutions too.
I suggest you study some of these things. If water followed humans, Southern California would have significantly fewer problems. Also, if you're familiar with any case where soil was moved on a large scale (say, thousands of square km), please share.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Southern California is not my country. My country's got no such problems. And seeing as how I live in a city with streets like front, lakeshore, and quay, it's basically hundreds of square kilometres of land that wasn't there.
Different country, different attributes. We've got water everywhere here. Water follows humans -- here. Not California. Here. It's a totally different climate. That's the point. If it warms up just a little bit, the soil comes for free.
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of "sardaukar86" (foaming @ the mouth) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... and http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of "sardaukar86" http://news.slashdot.org/comme... and http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of "sardaukar86" http://news.slashdot.org/comme... and http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
The level of complete lunacy from the libtarded moonbat socialist left. "Help! The polar ice caps are melting!" And other progressive fairy tales. Reality much?