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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.
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?
Because the first thought when confronted with a troubling scientific report is to consult an economist...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I will give you a hint, pro-climate change scientists tend to be funded by universities and in some cases governments.
Deniers tend to be funded by Exxon, and their like.
So tell, me who gets tot see the world on expenses - the deniers or the scientists?
If you can't see the answer than that tells me who is funding your internet connection. After all the deniers have expressly admitted paying people to spread lies.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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..."
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.
I call it a report written by climatologists. You know, SCIENTISTS...
I get it. It tells you things you don't want to hear, so you have this need to cast aspersions on it.
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 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 call it a report written by climatologists. You know, SCIENTISTS...
I get it. It tells you things you don't want to hear, so you have this need to cast aspersions on it.
I hate those scientists, they have an agenda. They even question God's intelligent design.
When you link to dailymail, you automatically make everyone assume you're wrong and an idiot. Just for reference. You may not be, but everyone stopped reading your post when they see the dailymail link.
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It is a report written by climatologists, but in prior reports from the same body reasonable projections have been excluded from consideration for being too extreme, so it's also a political report. Which way they are bending the studies this time I don't know. I may find out, but probably not for a month or so.
N.B.: There are a LOT of studies. You can't include all of them, not even all the ones that don't have obvious errors, and deciding which to exclude is a political decision when done under governmental supervision. Last time they excluded the extreme reports in an attempt to not appear to be crepe-hangers, and get taken seriously. It didn't work. Perhaps this time they've decided to bend the other way...or perhaps not, because I've seen reports of studies that were a LOT worse. Some of them project >6 C before the end of the century. But they were making assumptions about particulate emmissions and CO2 emmissions that CANNOT be validated, because they depend on political choices that have not yet been made. OTOH, they are right in line with the choices that have been made in the past.
P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.
P.P.S.: I am not a climatologist. There are likely several studies that I've never heard of, and there may well be flaws in some of the studies that I have heard of that I didn't hear about.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
Let's say that the climate change will cause people in the UK one unit of inconvenience, to Syrians, three units of inconvenience, and chemical weapons will cause Syrians thirty units of inconvenience. The problem is, you could invade Syria and destroy the chemical weapons withing months, if you wanted. That's at most fifteen unit-years of inconvenience. But those three units of inconvenience due to climate change will apparently persist in Syria for *at least* many decades, if not a century or more. That's already dozens of unit-years of inconvenience, perhaps hundreds. Also, people have a tremendous capacity for dismissing long-term problems. Perhaps asking Syrians what they are worried about, while usually valid, isn't valid universally.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Actually the SPM has be accused of not being alarmist enough.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can go to the bottom of the report page 38 for a chart and review the differences in the between a "low emission mitigation scenario" RCP 2.6 (one that we try to help the problem) and a high emission scenario (where we keep on keepin on.) RCP 8.5.
While temps go up for both, the mitigation scenario leads to a much more livable planet, closer to the one we live in today. the difference between scenarios is stark, an average of 3C difference by 2100. Children born today could easily live to see 2100, they would be 86 years old. So for me in Houston TX that means a hot summer day that was 100F will be 105.5F. The mitigation scenario could reverse the warming trend as early as 2050. You are correct that even the best case scenario doesn't allow for a return to current temperatures by 2100. In my mind the question is how long until we realize we our saving our own skins and make some hard decisions. Everybody want's a livable planet, but nobody want's to be the first to make the sacrifice.
TODO create witty sig.
A non climatologist says the climatologists are wrong. You are paying attention to what an economist 'feels' is right, why?
Of, right, becasue you don't understand the science so you need to glom onto anything that supports your ignorance. Even when that person isn't an expert in the fields
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People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.
Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.
That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.
Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.
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I once saw an economist get up in a symposium and claim that the carrying capacity of the Earth -- the number of humans it could support -- was infinite.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
it's a 11 year cycle. Important to know, but in no way is it an argument against global warming.
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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.
I call it a report written by climatologists. You know, SCIENTISTS...
This is the WG2 "summary for policy-makers" report. It is based on the WG1 scientific report, unlike the scientific report the summary is also reviewed, edited, and signed off, by the 195 governments who participate in the IPCC. When taken as a whole I can not think of any other formal review process that comes close to the scale and accuracy of the IPCC.
This is the same kind of report that made the infamous 2035 error about glaciers, however in 20+yrs nobody has spotted an error in the WG1 scientific reports. Given the scale and controversy involved that is strong evidence of an extraordinary robust process. Yet they still took the glacier error seriously enough to tighten up the process even further
With a budget of US$5-6 million per year split between 195 countries, the IPCC is a bargain. One of the main reasons it is so cheap is that the authors are not paid a dime, the budget pays for conference facilities, air fares, and a handful of full time admin staff. Detailed financial accounts are publicly available on the IPCC web site. Pity we don't get to see the accounts of the paid character assassins who attack it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Wow, a brand new system of GPS has a higher resolution than one that has been in use for a couple decades. That surely proves the earth is heating up.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
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.
"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?
| The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay.
The BEST form of sequestration is to put solid, compressed, carbon in permanent long-term geologic storage.
Thing is, it already comes this way, it's called "coal". We just have to STOP unearthing it, but that's not profitable.
Funny you should mention a 30 year old man. The last time the global average temperature for any month was below the 20th Century (1901-2000) average was 30 years ago in February of 1984. So that 30 year old man has never experienced a world where the monthly average temperature was below the 20th Century average.