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Climate Damage 'Irreversible' According Leaked Climate Report
New submitter SomeoneFromBelgium (3420851) writes According to Bloomberg a leaked climate report from the IPPC speaks of "Irreversible Damage." The warnings in the report are, as such, not new but the tone of voice is more urgent and more direct than ever. It states among other things that global warming already is affecting "all continents and across the oceans," and that "risks from mitigation can be substantial, but they do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation action."
Are you telling me that spewing into the atmosphere millions of years of accumulated sunlight and cutting down most of the natural CO2 scrubers (trees) of the world will have negative effects? Nah! Imposible!
We'll never do anything about climate change as long as businesses can dictate law, control the EPA, and guide lawmaking through lobbyists. The Supreme Court has literally ensured this.
I can't stand the idea that multi-billion corporations can't afford to spend 1/8th of their profit, if even that much, to operate in a more environmentally friendly manner.
Gotta hoard and accumulate money at all costs, no matter what happens.
From the article:
The UN panel since September has published three separate reports into the physical science of global warming, its impacts, and ways to fight it. The study leaked yesterday, called the “Synthesis Report” intends to pick out the most important findings and present them in a way that lawmakers can easily understand. (Emphasis mine)
Why do I have a feeling the report to the politicians will have to read a lot like the Simple English Wikipedia, to the point where it might not be a bad idea to get the writers for that on it.
"Global warming is a bad thing that causes lots of problems. Burning stuff causes global warming. If you keep burning stuff, you will have a bad problem."
Don't worry. Seriously, some very rich people who made a fortune selling gas and coal have assured us that these climate change alarmists are just a bunch of melodramatic liars. There's nothing to worry about.
Climate has always changed, the concept of "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it.
You mean, the same way as asteroids of various sizes have impacted into the Earth throughout the history of the planet, and "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it?
Yes, I agree.
It was kind of going that way anyhow though, either to a tropical earth or back towards a new ice age. And really given the choice the tropical option is less destrcutive. As I understand it we were in an interglacial until people started digging up sequestered carbon and injecting it into the atmosphere. Either way I don't believe it will be possible to stabilise the climate over the mid to long term, at least not with our current technology, so maybe its best just to prepare to adapt to these changes.
I, for one, welcome our new raccoon-descended overlords.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
“Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally,” the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in the draft.
Oh great. "The sky is gonna fall! Almost 100 years from now!!! Disaster is looming!!!!"
And people wonder where deniers come from?
Here's a hint: exaggeration and catastrophic alarmism destroy credibility.
Those are a lot of conclusions to draw when you openly admit that you have insufficient measurements and cost estimates.
Yes, we should prepare, but we can not adapt. With are current Greenhouse gas release, there isn't an endpoint survivable by humans. It will get two warm for food growth, anywhere. People act like, well it will happen and we will just farm 200 miles more north.
Hogwash. Even in the IPCC A1FI scenario, the most pessimistic case presented, total global warming by 2100 is 1.4C to 6.4C. Yes, that would have significant bad effects but it's not going to mean the end of agriculture across the entire planet. Earth isn't going to turn into Venus. The average temp at the equator now is 30C while in Siberia it's only 0.5C. So, if we look at the average high temperature for Novosibirsk during the hottest month of July (25.7) and add the high end of the worst case scenario (6.4C) then we only get 32.1C, so yeah moving north will be an option. I'd expect massive droughts in the equatorial zones, the collapse of many third world governments and a huge refugee crisis but that's not the same as saying it's unsurvivable by humans as a species.
single average-sized car puts out 4.75 metric TONS of carbon every year
That sounds an unreasonably high figure.
Petrol weighs about 737g / l, so 4750Kg of petrol is 6445 litres.
Wikipedia says the carbon content of petrol is up to about 85%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So 6445/0.85 = 7582 litres of petrol contain 4.75t of carbon.
Wikipedia suggests average fuel economy is somewhere around 5l / 100Km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
7582*100/5 = 151640Km - I'm pretty sure that the average car doesn't travel 152Mm/year!
Lets assume you're talking about tons of CO2 rather than tons of carbon.
Apparently we multiply litres of petrol by 2.331 to get Kg of CO2 emitted: http://www.carbontrust.com/res...
So 4750/2.331 = 2038 litres. At 5l / 100Km, this gives us 2038*100/5 = 40760Km - ok, a vaguely more reasonable figure.
Apparently the average company car does around 30,000Km/year and the average private car does about 12,000Km: http://www.racfoundation.org/m...
So the average is going to be well under 41Mm and around an order of magnitude less than the 152Mm you claimed!
I'm certainly not saying that climate change is nothing to worry about - I think it's a big problem and whether or not you think it's man made, dumping vast amounts of crap into the atmosphere can't possibly be a bright idea. But I really wish people wouldn't just invent bogus "facts" to back up their arguments - the arguments should stand up for themselves, if you need bogus data to prop them up then you've got something really badly wrong somewhere.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
We don't have foreknowledge of shit. It's a pretty epic level of arrogance to think we've suddenly acquired the ability to accurately see 100 years into the future when EVERY SINGLE ATTEMPT in the past to accurately predict anything even 20 years in the future has failed MISERABLY and has been LAUGHABLY wrong.
The only thing that I predict about what this planet is going to look like 100 years from now is that it's going to be nothing like what anyone expects today.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I have a slightly different take on it. Using absolutes like "irreversible" or "unavoidable" is dangerous is because it decreases public support for what you're trying to accomplish. People will think, "well if we can't do anything about it, then I guess there's nothing left to do but live it up in the time we have left."
1. Average planetary temperature now is about 12C. Average temperature for most of the past billion years or so is 22C
2. Average CO2 concentration today is EXTREME geological LOW. It's been as high as > 7000ppm
3. There's pretty much ZERO correlation between CO2 and temperature.
Note well that if temperatures go up 2C, we've still got 8C to go before the planet reaches its "normal" average temperature.
Ok, I'll accept that... of course the first mammals appeared on the planet around say 225million years ago, and were the size of perhaps a mouse or smaller. Larger mammals have been found around 100million years ago, around the size of a large rat perhaps... it wasn't until say 55million years ago the earliest ancestor for man/primates appeared, Archicebus, which would fit in the palm of your hand and weigh maybe an ounce.
So maybe instead of the past "billion years" we should focus on say the past 50million, where temperatures and CO2 levels were at a level where a mammal like mankind could survive on most of the planet? Seems rather pointless to say the planet has been "22C average" when at the time it was mankind didn't exist, and more than likely with a 10C increase over current temperatures it's unlikely human beings could survive in many areas (a 100F desert will kill in a day or two w/o water - imagine 120-130F?).
I mean, unless you're worried about ants, cockroaches, and mammals the size of mice, and shrews, it might be wiser to focus on temperatures that human beings can and have survived in, and not some 'average' that includes numbers from many (up to 950million) years before anything even remotely human-like existed. Because, yes, "life" existed at 7000ppm and 22C - but not human life.