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US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post on the U.S. government's newest national assessment of climate change. It says Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. 'Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation.' The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. 'What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.'"
It looks like they are having a hard time discerning predictions and actual events. The 2013 Atlantic season had ZERO major hurricanes, and only TWO total hurricanes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
It's extremely difficult to accept at face value a report that says every possible outcome from climate change is bad.
Especially when it comes from an administration that campaigned on the theme of change.
Several of the items they cite are not even principally related to climate change, but to population and
population density increases, and to past fire suppression policies. People being people, not people changing the climate.
See, this is why I don't think global warming matters much after all. We're collectively incapable of preventing it because our minds just aren't made to care about long-term issues that can only be understood analytically. But by the same token, when thousands of people die and trillions of dollars are wasted unnecessarily, we also won't care about that, because it will happen over many decades, and we'll never know for sure which individual people died unnecessarily, or by what percentage our bank balances would have been larger without global warming, and anyways the TV reporting will be interesting to watch and we can fly Old Glory over the wreckage and take pictures of stuffed animals in the rubble and so forth. So, it's all good.
Interesting that just today, I also read this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
It claims that a full 1/3rd. of the warming in the 1990's, on record, was actually due to water vapor in the air, vs. CO2 emissions and the like. Yes, it's not saying this is cause to deny the phenomenon, but it shows how we're still really in the early stages of understanding the details..... The statements of fact about exactly what's happening are largely premature.
My 2014 Mustang GT (Premium) has 425 horsepower and runs like an ape with his ass on fire. I'm grilling steaks this weekend and drinking beer on the deck in my back yard. Every night I sleep with my air conditioner set to 70 and I water my lawn daily. I'm having way too much fun to care about this subject. The climate will change and we'll adapt and even if we don't I'll be dead in a few decades and won't give a shit then either. I'm also not paying back any of that money my elected representatives borrowed from China. Sadly none of that was meant to be sarcastic. It's all true. That last part was sarcastic. There's nothing sad about it. Have a beer and pull up a chair on the deck. It's going to be a long drought and/or ice age. Might as well get comfortable.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
While I believe this report is overall truthful, I can't help but think of Clair Cameron Patterson. It took him 20 years of fighting corporations and their "bought and payed for" scientists to convince enough people in our government that the nation was dying due to lead poisoning to actually do something about it. This despite the fact that the reality of it was in-your-face blatant the whole time. We should all consider him a hero and be thankful that he solely lead the charge against the ridicule he faced. Although a largely unsung and unknown hero, he really did save the nation. The convincing that needs done now is a bit more diverse and politically complicated. Lets hope we come to our senses in time on the issue of climate change as we did with lead.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life. Sure there will be winners and loser, and the losers will be big oil/coal companies -- some of the most powerful institutions in the world -- and that's why nothing is being done. It is really easy to throw mud and claim there is "confusion" on whether AGW is happening. Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.
AGW is easy to solve compared to the little lies we tell ourselves about what is moral, in order to protect our little empires.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Cooling trend? Not sure where you come up with that. Here is the temperature trend over the last 15 years: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g...
That's a change of + 0.18 C over the period. That is a rather large increase for 15 years.
The Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health came out in 1964. It clearly and undeniably showed the evidence that smoking was harmful. Now, 50 years later, only about 1/2 of the states have actually banned smoking in enclosed public spaces.
Why does anyone expect America to respond to AGW any quicker or more effectively?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
When the international communities remark with amazement at how recalcitrant american business, government, and even its own people are to even the suggestion of climate change I cant help but wonder if, as an american, people from other countries have a full understanding of just what it would mean for us to change...Everything we do, and all that we are, is prediacted upon cheap reliably supplied oil. this was a decision made after world war 2 and reinforced by the carter doctrine of foreign policy. it was a horrendous mistake.
We dont have local farms or slaughterhouses. everything is created in one place, and delivered by trucks that run on roads subsidized by american taxpayers from one of maybe a handful of factory farms dotted throughout the midwest. American markets have no season; if you want a jackfruit, it can and will be delivered more than two thousand miles to you and the ramifications of that is not even a cursory consideration. Drinks are kept cold, constantly. Ice is plentifully and liberally added to nearly any beverage you get. Beer hovers somewhere around the freezing mark. We can do this because the way we approach energy is just as we had in the 50's.
our rail system is no different than it was in the early 50's. slight modifications have been made to handle larger cargo, but the system runs at around 40 miles per hour and carries only the most cumbersome goods. Cars, Coal, shale oil and natural gas are the chief passengers. toxins too dangerous to transport by semi truck, things like hydrofluoric acid, are also frequently transported. Corridor rail systems used in boston and LA that do in fact transport people are powered exclusively by diesel, as are all our rail systems. We have minimal and fiercely debated electric light rail systems in some cities, and some have transitioned their busses to natural gas, however outside our largest four or five metropolitan areas every transportation request you have will be granted by the automobile.
Im not trying to justify what we do or why we do it. Its sad, and unsustainable in my opinion but whats important to understand is that acknowledging climate change and doing something productive about it in America means infrastructure overhaul not seen since Franklin Delano Rosevelt. It means the average 1 hour american car drive to work has to stop. Perpetually illuminated office buildings have to stop. Cities like phoenix will have to stop landscaping bluegrass lawns and water features into communities and we as a nation will have to swallow a nice big slice of 'we did it wrong' pie. The reasons we dont do anything about this problem are mostly political, but under the politics and the money, you have a system of society that is at its foundation based on conspicuous, questionless consumption and the planned obsolescence of nearly everything. anything to retard or stymy consumption is seen as a natural threat.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Oil production has been plateauing despite more drilling in even more remote areas and deeper waters, with new methods of extraction being deployed (shale fracking - it's not just for gas y'know). We keep drilling more holes just to keep up with the diminishing returns.
The quality of the crude has declined, and it's gotten so bad in the past few years that now tar sands are economically viable because there's no place else to get it.
Or did you think "peak oil" means it would all run out in one night?
=Smidge=
If you think the climate scientists have anything to do with all of that nonsense, you are sadly mistaken. I sincerely doubt any of them even have access to a private jet.
Don't mistake the idiots that run things for the people who have a clue. There is little overlap.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
No one can predict the future.
I predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, and also the next day.
I predict the average temperature where I live will be warmer in August, and it will be cooler in January.
I predict a full moon on May 14, and a partial solar eclipse on October 23.
I predict that next year's calendars will (in America) mostly bear the year "2015".
I predict that in 2015 the Earth's atmosphere will still contain about 78% nitrogen.
I predict that, this coming June, elephants will be unable to fly under their own power, but sparrows will.
Of course people can predict the future. We can't predict everything. That doesn't mean we can't predict anything.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No. It's not even that.
The really big problem is, "Okay. It's happening. Now what do we actually DO about it?"
Right there the knives start coming out. Because everyone has a different idea of what should happen.
And there are very few concrete plans, based on actual, proven science.
Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem.
Then you have all the people proposing stuff like carbon sequestration through iron doping of algae and all sorts of unproven schemes based on pseudoscience.
Not to mention the fact that we STILL don't have a computer simulation that ACCURATELY models the phenomenon. In short, we can't even properly quantify THE PROBLEM. How the hell are we supposed to come up with a "solution"?
On top of that, everyone in the US could stop producing greenhouse gasses RIGHT NOW, and it wouldn't do a damn thing. Because everyone else is still putting the stuff out. SPECIFICALLY China. Unless we have government buy-in representing the majority of the world's population all that's happening is that we're trading one set of bad actors for another.
And everyone's so precondition to fight over the smallest detail on this that I honestly feel that nothing will ever TRULY be done about it.
Not through lack of care for the long term. But over-abundance of inflexible actors working at cross purposes.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As a conservative I do not believe in borrowing from future generations. We would all benefit now from running massive deficits but future generations would suffer. Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" but that is clearly not true. At some point the hammer must fall.
That's what we are doing with the climate. We all enjoy the benefits of cheap fuel while our kids are forced to bear the brunt of climate change and make the transition to new energy sources. It is not a good legacy.
My F's go to 11. (keyboard is missing a key)
I agree with what you say, but at some point we are going to need to make the transition away from fossil fuels. The impacts up front are relatively mild. Even if we start now we won't be able to avoid them, but we may avoid the worst impacts down the road.
Fascinating. While I can't comment on all of these points, I did a bit of searching regarding the second LINK about global sea ice: That graph shows the global sea ice area, not the volume. The area slightly increased while the volume has steadily gone down over the same period of time.
This is what makes it impossible for the armchair scientist to understand this. Inevitably, someone will reply telling me why my link is a bunch of dumbutts and how that graph is irrelevant, we should be looking at something else.
You don't know what peak oil is.
We are not finding new oil reserves faster than the rate of growth of oil usage.
We are always finding new oil, but the Chinese and other emerging industrial countries are consuming it faster than we are finding it.
New forms of energy are being stifled / legislatively hindered by oil interests. Why else are states trying to pass laws to tax solar panel installations?
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.
...so why hasn't anyone proposed this mysterious solution if it fixed the problem that "easily", with "barely any significant change in our style of life"?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Best estimates are that had we started maybe 10 years ago it would be about 3% of GDP over a defined period to solve the problem. It's a large number and it will take some effort, but so what? Previous generations dealt with problems larger than this. We have the means available with Nuclear power, solar and wind, which will only get cheaper as newer technologies arise through investment.
The problem is, people don't want to admit there is a problem. The honest truth of the skeptical position: "There's a problem but I'd rather leave it for future generations to solve than get off my arse" sounds a bit amoral, and hence we never hear that spoken out loud. Admit you have a problem and move on.
Because we're not supposed to mention the 'N' word. But since you asked; it's NUCLEAR fission!
Life is not for the lazy.
The Arctic sea ice has melted much faster than anyone was predicting just a decade ago. Ice, aerosols, and cloud cover are not very well understood, when you get a bunch of experts together to agree on a statement about those things in a report like the IPCC, the statement is almost certainly going to be conservative. What has changed recently is our ability to measure the changes in the ice mass of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps to a high level of precision using the GRACE satellite. It doesn't really help scientists make better predictions but it does provide a better test, and allow them to make more confident statements about what is happening now.
A silver lining? - I heard what could be considered good news to everyone (except coal barons). Here in Oz we're busily industrialising the great barrier reef by building a controversial coal mine and the largest coal port in the world. The multi-nationals who were behind the project (BHP, Rio, some banks,..) have all walked away from the project. It's now been reported (on a local business show) that the mine will probably not have the customers in India it expects. Why? - Because wind and solar are now roughly at parity price with imported coal in India and prices are dropping at a rate such that in 2-3yrs time renewables in India will be 10% cheaper than imported Aussie coal. What's is sounding even better is that coal exports have dropped significantly in price since the project was announced and yet it is still neck-to-neck with the price of renewables in India.
If those reports are not a gross exaggeration then it looks like some developing nations really will leapfrog the west and go straight to renewables.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.