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UN Climate Change Panel: It's Happening, and It's Almost Entirely Man's Fault
iONiUM writes The UN released a new climate change report which concludes that it is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault. From the article: "The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made." However, the report isn't entirely dire. It goes on to say: "To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to 'near zero or below in 2100.'" Below zero of course means mining existing CO2 out of the atmopshere somehow.
Here's the problem with that:
and
Environmental righteousness makes rich people feel good about themselves. But it hurts the world's poor.
I know it's not fashionable to RTFA but the IPCC report does propose actual solutions and costs those solutions (which will have negligible net cost)... they are the well-know solutions of more renewables, nuclear power and carbon sequestration along with a carbon tax.
The problem is that the corporations which have become rich on the current high CO2 emission path control the world's economies and governments so I can safely predict that nothing meaningful will be done and that we are all literally toast.
For more information (and interesting read), Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything"
http://books.simonandschuster....
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Since noone (except possibly you) believes that we're going to lose all land within 150km of the coasts in the next 50 years, your argument is, to put it bluntly, stupid.
Predicted sea level rise over the rest of this century (~85 years, not 50) is low enough that the routine level maintenance around New Orleans (a city that basically sits at or below sea level) will easily handle the problem. I'd imagine we could teach the stupider people of the world how to manage building a levee a whole 30cm tall within the frightfully short interval of 85 years, don't you think?
Note: arguing AGW is usually interesting, but some arguments are just plain idiotic....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
To worship the Invisible Hand means to believe that the free market always comes up with the best solutions for humanity, i.e. that it is a silver bullet rather than a tool which - like any tool - sometimes is suitable and sometimes is not. This is the same way some people answer every problem with "God!" even though God is just something humans make up for their own benefit and which as a concept has sometimes helped humanity (some of the most productive civilisations have been theistic) and sometimes has not.
We do need to promote economically sustainable solutions, yes. But that's not the same as providing solutions "that work in a free market", which has never existed. Many of the big tech developments of C19 (including in the USA) were based on temporary monopoly rights and public investments and guarantees which made remaining private investment worthwhile, for example. Government contributions, at least initially, are as essential to long-term R&D as they always have been. It's up to the voter whether they want to hand control over to profit-makers or to keep things under public control after that - and the most successful countries tend to choose a combination of public companies and well-regulated private industry, i.e. which suit no freshman idealist but which keep the average man/woman in the best possible living conditions.
No, you misunderstand. Increased CO2 results in the Earth building more heat every year. Nature is just responsible for balancing it between ocean and atmosphere. If you make a graph of just the El-Nino years, you see the temperature going up in a consistent trend. The same thing happens for the La-Nina years. It's just that the La-Nina trend line is a bit lower. http://www.bitsofscience.org/w...
And a slight drop since 1997. If you look at RSS, it was essentially flat from 1979 to 1996, then the big 1998 spike happened, then flat since then. It's not really an increasing trend, but a flat/stable with a single big step function that happened in 1998. If it was driven by man, we'd expect to see a relatively consistent, ongoing rise, wouldn't we? Rather than two basically flat/declining periods with one big step function year between...
Oh, you mean like so? http://woodfortrees.org/plot/r.... What does that remind me of?
Oh, yeah, The Escalator - "Global Warming" is nothing but long periods of stagnant temperatures with ignorable jumps in between, right?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.