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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.
Whether it's human caused or not. Whether climate change/global warming/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is happening or not. Whether we can actually stop it or not.
Let's just stop pollution for it's own sake!
That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.
I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat and Pollution is not because they're dumb, but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.
First rule of politics and law: never admit fault.
So everyone's wasting their time trying to convince the deniers of anything. They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.
You see, the thing is, that unlike your average slashdot reader the people at the IPCC actually RTFA so are allowed to have an opinion.
And who outsources everything to those countries? Hrm....
Science is not a "political decision", but you're right that China and India are great contributors toward the problem. Are you implying that we should stop outsourcing everything to China and India? If so, I agree.
It's time for the alarmist side to stop pretending there are any policy choices on the table to prevent the warming they are predicting.
What the *fuck* are you talking about? There's plenty of stuff that can be done. The only reason that they're not being done is that the wealthy would have to foot the bill, and they don't want to.
I don't respond to AC's.
Anyone not woowoo anti-science (usually being the theistic types who worship the Invisible Hand) has already established:
1. Climate change is mostly man-made;
2. This doesn't mean the world's about to end, but we aren't doing enough to prevent significant harm.
I believe that you aren't being fair to the "theistic types" in that you aren't being nearly hard enough on those who are taking advantage of them and those who are similarly gullible. Those cocksuckers are, of course, the energy industry. They have a huge interest in not changing things. Their businesses are hugely profitable. Spending money to avoid the erosion of those profits is part of that business. Spending as little as possible in order to preserve as much profit as possible is just good business, and right now, hoodwinking the gullible has the most ROI. I have seen it before....
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a town where every third job was directly related to the forest products industry. All my life, I watched huge swaths of ancient forest fall to clear cutting, knowing that the industry's party line, "Trees are America's Renewable Resource", was just so much cynical corporate bullshit. Planting "four trees for every tree 'harvested'" is not the same thing as growing even one board-foot of timber for every board-foot harvested. But the locals bought it, hook-line-and-sinker, because they wanted to. They needed to believe that their livelihoods were derived from a resource that would always be there. Fast forward forty years, or so. All the old-growth timber is long gone. Countless towns like mine are now ghost towns, "the mill" long closed and most of the forest jobs (fellers, choker setters, etc.) also gone. And the locals are still wondering what happened, while a cynical few, who reaped huge profits from the rape of a resource that can not be replaced in several of our lifetimes, could not give a shit. And the "intellectual elite", those credible experts, including most ironically, a handful of industry foresters, who predicted this can only say, "We told you so."
This same thing is happening now on a global scale WRT climate change. The opinion amongst those most qualified to cast one is overwhelming, dwarfed only by the noise from those whose profit is threatened by that opinion. And those whose livelihood, indeed, those whose very lifestyle depends on the industries that produce those profits, want very badly to believe all the noise. Based on my experience, they will continue to do so until it is far too late to do anything about it.
(Did you know ~30% of San Francisco's air pollution was emitted in China?)
Well... 25% of US coal exports goes to Asia.
http://www.eia.gov/todayinener...
U.S. coal exports have made steady inroads into the Asian market since 2007. Almost all the U.S. coal exported to Asia went to the world's top four coal importers: China, Japan, India, and South Korea. Asia's share of total U.S. coal exports increased from 2% in 2007 to 25% in 2012. While U.S. coal has also been gaining market share in Asia, it provided less than 4% of Asia's coal imports in 2012, and less than 1% of total coal consumed by the four large Asian importers.
And as natural gas pushes out coal in the US, that only means even more coal gets to be exported to Asia.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Hey, look at it this way.
USA gets cheap labor and ONLY a tiny fraction of pollution from its own coal.
Meanwhile, China pays USA for coal, keeps nearly all of the pollution from said coal, and exports cheap labor to USA.
USA gets cleaner air, cheap products and profit - while China gets cheap energy, much lesser profit and air and other pollution.
It's a win-win.
Mostly for USA, but it's a win-win.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
In global thermoclimatic war, the only way to win is not to play. No matter which country did the final pollution/greenhouse emission/etc, what matters is that there is only world for all of us, lose it, and lose all.
Regular people aren't the ones clamoring to do nothing about climate change.
Yes, they are. The businesses who sell them things are keenly aware of what regular people want and are willing to pay for. Regular people don't want to pay $15 for a gallon of gas, have their taxes hugely increased, have their job go away, have their food become wildly more expensive, and have the economy crippled so they can be seen Doing The Right Thing in a country of 300 million people, while billions of people doing a whole lot of last-century-style polluting don't do anything along the same lines, thus making the economic wreckage even worse.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We would expect to see a consistent rise, if all the heat was just going in the atmosphere. In reality, most of the heat goes in the oceans, and the distribution between oceans/atmosphere has some variation. The most notable of those variations is caused by the ENSO cycle. During El-Nino years, more of the heat goes into the atmosphere, and during La-Nina years, more heat goes into the ocean. The year 1998 which you mention, had a record El-Nino, so a lot of the heat went into the atmosphere. We haven't had a big El-Nino year since then, so it's been slightly cooler. The satellite records are a bit more sensitive to this effect because they don't really measure the surface temperature very well. Instead, they measure the temperature of the atmosphere a bit higher up.
Did you know China's having a serious economic crisis because the era of outsourcing is dying? You're fighting last century's battles, my friend. Manufacturing capacity in the US never really fell, it just became more automated (so the jobs went away, but not the output). As technological progress makes it cheaper to make things here with robots than in China with sweatshops, the tail end of manufacturing is coming back - and because of technology, you don't see the air anymore in most US cities.
Meanwhile, China and India are countries in their own right with their own economies. They're not some children whose deeds can be attributed to their parents in the US! They're going through the same technological revolution we did in the 1800s, though much faster and at 10x the scale. Their air pollution is about what ours was once - it's just that we've cleaned up our act so very much since then that even across an ocean their pollution is a significant portion of ours.
Over the course of this century, US and Europe and Japan are likely to fade as the leading economies. India, China, and Brazil (and to some extent Korea, but their population likely will stay small in comparison) will be the ones to watch, because as technology evens out it's all about population, and if you're worried about carbon emission or any other byproduct of economies, fix your attention there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Science is not a "political decision",
But the UN is not a gathering of scientists; it's a gathering of politicians, and as such they make political announcements. As a political body with 1 vote per country, pretty much all they ever do is call for redistribution of wealth, and that directly motivates any muddled reading of science that you'll get from them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yeah. yeah, is all a giant conspiracy involving just about every scientific institution on the planet and at least 195 nations, it stretches back to 1958 when the National Academies of Science told the US government the same thing.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Okay, I'll bite. Let's look at a few of what major environmental movements actions were around in the general ballpark of 1914 (let's say, 1910 to 1920) which met controversy from industry. Tell me which of them you think weren't in the right.
Let's first remember that the first real "conservationist president", Theodore Roosevelt, had just served, and taken vast swaths of land away from industrial interests. Lumber interests especially despised him. George Bird Grinnell had just made hunters mad by banning the killing of buffalo and limiting hunting / fur rights in many areas. But let's get to 1910-1920, by the time which a solid "green lobby" had managed become a powerful force in congress. What wins did those eco-nuts manage to pull off?
Establishment of Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Haleakala, Hawaii Volcanoes, Lassen Volcanic, Denali, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks. Most of which met with industry resistance, sometimes major. They'd been trying to make Grand Canyon a national park, for example, since 1882, but it encountered so much resistance that it took 37 years to achieve; its success was considered one of the greatest successes o the conservation movement at the time.
Protection of the most magificent forests of the US. 1914 was the year that famous conservationist John Muir died. It's largely due to his efforts and those who worked with him, for example, that logging of the Giant Sequoias was mostly stopped. The logging industry, one of the biggest in the US at the time, was not amused.
The New York State Audubon Plumage Law banned the sale of plumes of wild birds in the state in 1910 - birds had been widely killed left and right for the fashion industry, and you better believe that the (sizeable) NYC fashion industry fought against that one. But they lost. And by the end of the decade, 12 more states had passed similar laws. Those eco-nuts in the new Audubon Society also got the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 passed, against hunting and fashion interests. It passed a limited but still major earlier victory, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913.
So, do you think the world would be a better place with the American Buffalo extinct, over half a dozen fewer popular national parks, all of the large sequoias gone, and countless local bird species exinct? Oh, but the economic impact all of those eco-nuts were causing back then, why won't someone please think of the economy...
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
That's why regulation and taxes are legitimate means towards solving the failures of market economics, like pollution.
And yet it consistently fails to accomplish anything other than squeezing the middle class, increasing poverty, and increasing income disparities. It never affects "the rich", it falls predominantly on the middle class, which has already suffered from globalization, job competition with 3rd world wages, and excessive regulation that protects the larger corporations and creates barriers for small businesses and sole proprietorships. Doubling-down on these policies simply ensures a neo-feudalism, a partnership between the corporate executives and the government bureaucracies, swapping positions with the revolving door of regulators and boards of directors of the regulated, and the lawmakers that pass laws that they write.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia