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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.
Uh.. what do you plan to do with the oil you extract?
Oil has a relatively flat demand curve. So the oil produced through CO2 displacement would mostly replace oil from conventional oil fields, resulting in a net reduction in atmospheric CO2.
I think the point you are trying to make, is that if a solution is not 100% perfect, then it is better to just do nothing. Whatever.
America has plenty of depleted oilfields, while most conventional oil is produced overseas. So by shifting production, enhanced production by CO2 displacement can strengthen our economy, generate jobs for Americans, and weaken repressive governments in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.
Is this the same UN Climate Panel that was predicting 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010, and then silently pulled all mentions of this from their website when 2010 rolled around and they turned out to be off by 50 million?
About 50% of China's pollution is caused by exports.... so all that cheap crap you buy that's made in China counts towards China's pollution. The corporations have not only outsourced all the jobs to China, but the pollution too.
The pollution from shipping the junk from China (boats and planes) isn't tallied in any accounts so total pollution is more.
So, the pollution drifting over San Francisco is just the pollution catching up with the stuff shipped over and sitting on WalMart shelves.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Someone should do a research project and determine exactly who will benefit from the draconian measures needed to reduce or even eliminate fossil fuel use. Who will profit by the tremendous rise in cost thereof artificially imposed by governments. If this were carefully researched it could qualify for someone’s PhD thesis. Would Al Gore and his allies win or lose if this were imposed upon people, especially in Western industrialized countries.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
We are trying to save the planet.
We're also trying not to dump our standard of living.
I hit this when there were just six posts, and someone had linked to a national geographic report detailing how politically charged this IPCC report is. It's a complete farce. It has since been downmodded to oblivion. Completely ridiculous.
Yes, that's why the IPCC's 1990 and 1995 reports claimed to unequivocally detect AGW. If the IPCC were simply assessing AGW rather than uncritically promoting it, the IPCC might have said that they couldn't yet unequivocally detect AGW.
But they didn't, so Jane's right.
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...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Before implementing a global carbon tax maybe the IPCC predictions should be looked at more closely, no?
The IPCC first assessment report(still available on their site) had temperature projections that we can compare today to see how they match reality nearly 25 years later. Take a look for yourself, and they clearly predict a warming of 0.5C from 1990 temperatures by 2014 IF CO2 emissions remained frozen at 1990 levels. So, sort of their best case scenario. In reality, CO2 emissions have steadily climbed much, much higher than 1990 levels. Today's temperatures though sit at a warming of 0.4C higher than 1990 levels.
The IPCC more recent third assessment from 2001 has much improved projections, and we can again compare them to reality 15 years out. The 2001 assessment has error bars included and a decade more research and refining behind it. If you compare it as well, you see today's temperatures DO fit within the error bars projected 15 years ago by the IPCC, albeit barely. Of course, they are way, way down on the lowest end of the error bars.
What the above tells me is that reality has shown the IPCC has consistently been overestimating the amount of warming to be expected. In other words, the science says don't panic just yet.
Switching to electric cars and nuclear power are a good idea regardless of CO2 emissions, so we should push forwards with them. If for no other reason than they are simply better and cheaper if we invest in them properly. A massive reduction in CO2 emissions that comes with it is entirely secondary as a side benefit. Really, less coal smoke and exhaust fumes are probably the bigger win. Particularly in places like China were even seeing the sun is become rare indeed.
Phil Jones manipulated data to prove AGW and still couldn't prove it. He then deleted the original data after ignoring 7 years of FOIA requests beucase a court was about to force him to delete the data. He claimed he ran out of disk space, but ran out 7 years after it was asked for. His original data is the basis for all IPCC reports.
This is not the actions of a scientist confident in his results. He also has no answer for the now 18 years of no warming, and he has admitted his models have been shown to be wrong (probably because he manipulted the data originally).
THIS is why AGW supportes get tossed into the intellectual dustbin. They cannot give responses to the above and resort to name calling, like denier, instead. They have lied multiple times and been caught at it over and over to the point the general public no longer believes them. That is why they now depend on a government to implement thier policies against the will of the general public because any democratic method of implementing their policies will fail because of their past lies and they know it.
I have no illusions about the oil industry's "benevolance" but here's the thing.
If we were to suddenly withdraw the 160 exajoules of energy from the world's energy budget provided by oil, you could pretty much guarantee the death of at least 6 billion people over the course of a year.
Our food industry, and interdependent supply chains are critically dependent on cheap, high energy density transportation fuel and the infrastructure that supports it.
*Some* of that be replaced, eventually. It'll be expensive, and quite frankly, is going to require that industrial civilization downsize. Population too, I expect. You're just not going to feed 7 billion plus folks without oil.
So be careful what you wish for. Should economic activity drop enough to no longer be able to sustain oil production worldwide, and that production infrastructure deteriorates enough, you'll see that scenario, played out over 30 years instead of one. Still not pretty.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Clean energy is cheaper and helps the poor. In Nigeria they are building up electricity supplies with geothermal, for example, which is cheap and doesn't make the people living near it ill. Pollution has a very real cost, especially if you are poor and can't avoid it. Coal is only cheap when it is allowed to harm people.
Much of Africa lacks an electricity grid anyway. This is a golden opportunity for them to build distributed energy supplies. Such supplies are cheap too, and more importantly available because no-one is going to build out grid infrastructure to places that can't afford to pay for the energy it carries. Solar PV and batteries to provide lighting in the evenings is a massive deal for developing nations.
As for burning stuff, they don't need electric heating. They need a clean burner, that vents the dust and soot outside their homes. Biomass is carbon neutral, and actually the ash could be captured and used too if they had the equipment.
A western lifestyle is neither necessary nor the best option for much of the world.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
1. The lumber Industry was killed by the EPA and their Spotted Owl nonsense.
This is categorically false. The spotted owl "nonsense" did not eve slow down the "harvesting" of old growth timber. Two things killed the timber industry:
[citation needed] ...because you clearly do no know what you are talking about.
In other words, you have fallen for the same timber industry bullshit. What you are going to find, if you even bother to look is an impressive number of "re-forested" acres. Big fucking deal. An acre of Douglas fir saplings is not the same thing as an acre of mature forest, nor will it ever be so, given the industry's current practices.