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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.
"mining existing CO2 out of the atmosphere somehow"
Such as extracting it from the atmosphere, or taking it directly from power plant emissions, compressing it into a liquid, and using it for enhanced oil recovery of otherwise unproductive oilfields. The CO2 displaces the oil, and also greatly increases its viscosity.
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!
Men were fine living in caves with one campfire each. We only invented cars and electricity to impress women.
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.
This report is going to cause Rush Limbaugh to have diarrhea.
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.
it [ climate change ] is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault
So let's find this man and ask him if he wouldn't mind stopping, please?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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....
Once upon a time, long long ago, the news media was objective and reported facts. Think Edward Murrow, Walter Cronkike. These days it's like a page from the 1976 movie "Network" - where news isn't suppose to be informative... it's suppose to be entertainment, the facts be damned. Now we live in a time of "balanced" journalism... which means when two sides of a story are presented the journalist pretends that both are equally valid. Global Warming is just one example of many where this has allowed the public to be mislead. I'm surprised that I haven't yet seen a discussion about whether the earth revolves around the sun, or the sun revolves around the earth... or the earth is flat vs. the earth is round. Perhaps that has already occurred and I have missed it. I wouldn't be surprised. The media needs to pull their collective heads out of their asses and do some actual journalism - however since the media is now controlled by multinational corporations, that probably isn't going to happen. Ratings is the name of the game... so I guess we're the blame also. We need to stop patronizing media outlets that spread bullshit. People need to decide what they want. Do they want to be entertained, or do they want to be informed?
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?
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.
What does it matter if it's man's fault? If it turned out that this was all part of a natural cycle that was going to kill us all, then we would have just as much reason to do something about it as if it was our fault.
The real question has always been how much do we spend in order to prevent the damage that is coming. This report seems to be saying "Please turn off everything". So, in order to prevent a large portion of humanity dying, we should stop using the technology that is currently keeping many of them alive. Studies like this are yet another diversion from a real practical discussion of how we make the best of the situation we're in.
The future of humanity will be much better off with China and India bring modern societies of economic freedomm with commensirate contributions to technological advancement, than in a nice green world with them in dirt floor poverty.
I, for one, welcome a doubling of technological advancement rate.
We can less predict the state of life in 2114 than 1914 could predict today.
Screw them in 1914 if they had slammed on the brakes to "help" us in 2014, leaving us with 1970 tech.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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?
Seriously, this group continues to scream that America is the biggest determent to changing this. They grip about the amount that America produces per capita.
Yet, America as a whole, produces less than 15% of the CO2. Likewise, our per capita is less than 16.
BUT, what is most important, is the fact that our production and per capita are dropping each and every year for the last 7 years.
How does this compare to other nations? Well, China, who is given a pass by these groups, now account for more than 33% of yearly CO2 production. In addition, their per capita is now above most of Europe's and will beat America's within 3 years.
At this time, most of the west continues to drop their CO2 though Germany's is back on the rise since they shut down their nuke plants and are replacing them with new coal plants. America has shut down massive numbers of coal plants over the last 6 years due to economics, will not be building new coal plants, and is about to shut down many older coal plants due to EPA finally bringing fourth new regs.
BUT, China, India, South Africa, Russia, etc. continue to build massive new coal plants. These will exists for the next 25-50 years. They will NOT be shutdown. And all of them want to follow China's lead in leaving pollution control off, which will lead to massive new mercury/lead/etc emissions.
The neo-cons/tea* types will not be making changes. They will not look at science and admit that man is causing this. I suspect that they are simply lying to themselves, but at the least, it indicates a real lack of intelligence.
HOWEVER, when the liberals acknowledge that there is a problem and then focus not only a relatively small player, but ignore the major emitter and the fact that 3rd world nations are building new plants at a rate that is mind blowing, well, it shows that liberals are just as foolish, if not worse, than the above neo-cons/tea*.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let me guess - the proposed remedy involves the wealthier nations paying lots of money to the poorer nations?
It is nothing of the kind. They want poor individuals to make sacrifices (regress back to donkey carts, work for nothing, and eat bugs) so the delegates and the people they represent can keep their private jets and beluga caviar and still breathe the air and drink the water ,and of course, sell the same to the rest of us... at a very reasonable price, I assure you...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Woman is as much to blame. In fact I see more tiny little blonde women driving Hummer H2's and Escalade XLT's alone than any other vehicle.
Blaming ALL this on men and not pointing the finger at women, the ones that are the real cause of global warming is Sexist.
Women are ALWAYS bitching about how cold it is, it's a fricking conspiracy, they have been trying to raise the temperatures for generations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
as developed.
The fact is that China ALONE accounts for 30% of all emissions. Their per capita is above most of Europes (not Germany and eastern europe), and will exceed America in the next 3 years.
Likewise, Russian, India, and South Africa are building massive new coal plants that will exists for decades to come.
The ones that need to make changes is ALL OF US. And the hardest one will not be the west, but China, India, Russia, and South Africa.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For starters, China, russia, India, and South Africa continue to build out massive new coal plants. They have NO intention of shutting these down for the next 50-70 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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"
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.
No matter how hard you bang the drums of class warfare, we're still not going to get to zero emissions by 2100.
Why, in a supposedly scientific study of warning is the source of warming (ie: the Sun) ignored and/or considered a constant in every study?
It isn't.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
The people who control our energy supplies are sociopaths. I don't believe they care about anybody's economy or repressive governments, outside their possible impediment to conducting business. If you want CO2 displacement, prove it will make a profit. Since our combined dollars don't amount to the proverbial *hill of beans*, next Tuesday will be your big chance to have any effect at all. Don't blame the system. Clean The House! They are all up for election. If you vote them all out, they just might get the message. Don't vote for industry errand boys, and turn off that light!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The planet is going to be just fine for a few more billion of years until the sun expands (barring asteroid collisions). It's just the easy first world standard of living that some of us are used to that is in danger of disappearing.
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.
Remote Sensing Systems (which uses satellite data) shows that there's been 0.123K of warming per decade since 1980.
1. The lumber Industry was killed by the EPA and their Spotted Owl nonsense.
2. There are more forested acres in the Northwest now than there were in the 1900.
And the fact that China accounts for 33% of CO2 emissions has NOTHING to do with facts. Right?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
(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
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.
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.
Everyone is going to pay one way or another... some just seem to think starting with prevention will be cheaper than dealing with scrambling for a cure later on.
Others, understandably, will just keep chugging along as they're accustomed to. No reason to change your ways if the sky isn't falling. Can't get blamed for anything that happens that you don't see coming. Can't be held accountable for it either. And they probably won't.
Case in point: drought... (whether it's related to Anthropogenic Climate Change or not is irrelevant). As you may recall, farmers in CA had to ration their water rights this year. The government stepped in and enforced a 30% reduction on farms as they have during past droughts.
For the smaller farms that had already invested in more efficient drip irrigation technologies, this pretty much means they suffered a 30% reduction in crop output, since they're already getting the maximum crop output from their water.
For the larger farms that were using inefficient flood irrigation, they got a nice emergency government subsidy to upgrade to drip irrigation. So they had the same crop output as before this year, because the increases in efficiencies more than made up for reduced quota.
So as you see, under the system we have in place now, it absolutely makes sense to be as wasteful as possible from an entirely rational perspective. The early adopters will bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning things up both before and after issues arise. That's logic. That's the way it is.
For my part, I recently moved to a part of the US which is almost all hydro and wind power. Utilities are expensive. I pay more to to the sanitation dept. to clean my water runoff than it costs to deliver.
1/2 of the world's population lives in southeast Asia... including China, India, etc.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-...
They've been enacting lots of policies to deal with pollution and resources, stuff you'd absolutely hate to have here in the West. The smart and rich ones come here to get away from the pollution and crowding at home. It's nice.
And yet another perfect solution fallacy, ladies and gentlemen.
Each year, about 15% of the US population move. That means that after less than 20 years, the equivalent of the entire population of the US has moved. Does this cause people to become homeless refugees? No, of course not. Sea level rise is so slow relative to natural migration that it has never mattered and will never matter.
Most arable land is not on the coast, and climate change likely does not cause a significant net gain/loss in arable land. (You can find the papers yourself on Scholar).
Just like people move around, infrastructure effectively needs to be replaced every few decades anyway. It makes little difference whether it is replaced in the same location or elsewhere.
No, you got just about everything wrong.
Until such time as it is somehow ever immediately profitable for corporations to try changing to do something about this, we can be assured that absolutely nothing will ever change.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
...they reach the conclusions they are paid to reach by finding published literature that supports those conclusions
Ah, finally! A rational viewpoint here...
Like green peace is going to support ANY nuclear power options....
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!
That's not ignoring the sun. That's taking a careful look at the changes in the sun's output, and deciding that it's not a major factor. If you don't believe so, please find a graph of TSI (total solar irradiance) for the last century, and compare with a graph of global temperature anomaly during the same time.
The IPCC gains its data from researchers. You're just repeating the tired "scientists are an evil cabal" line that anti science goons have been invoking for over a century when science dares question some sacred belief.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere the more negative effects we see. Therefore reducing greenhouses gasses is a good thing, that will also preserve long chain hydrocarbons for more important uses.
Or do you also believe in magical infinite oil that will continue being brought to the surface like some sort of inverted manna?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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...
"But if you know of a third option, I am all ears."
Third option: Non-carbon generated electricity that is cheaper than carbon. (That's an economic, as in real, 'cheaper', not tax/subsidy to make it cheaper)
"Why would it ignore China and India?"
Because the last one did, and if it hadn't have, they would have told us to go pound sand anyway. They are going to do what they want.
Let me tell you what they want. They want a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with central heat and air and 2 cars in the driveway. Each. Do the math on that times billions of people.
So the cheap electricity option is not even really an option, is it?
First off, per capita is WORTHLESS. The reason is that emissions has NOTHING to do with the number of ppl. It has EVERYTHING to do with GDP and choices made by businesses.
Secondly, America's 2013 per capita emissions was in 15, not 18. Heck, in this written for 2012, , they show that America was at 16.4, while EU was 7.4, and china was at 7.1.
In 2013, America's per capita went down into the 15, while China went up to 8's and EU edged upwards. So, total BS from you.
Third, I notice no links from you. I have seen you post this BS over and over, and always NEVER with links.
" Fourth, GDP emissions is outrageous from China. One of the worst in the world. And it continues to get bad. This is what has to stop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Breaking through "The tragedy of the commons" requires legislation. Solitary action is pointless.
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.
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.
You go right ahead and reduce your standard of living all you want, if that's what your religion calls for. Hairshirts and self-flagellation? It's your trip, man. But it's not my trip. I want everyone in the world to bring their standard of living up to mine! Instead of making everyone poor, how about we make everyone rich?
For 150 years now, technological improvement has reduced the pollution associated with a given standard of living, and the labor, energy, and resources needed for that production, because that's what technology is: efficiency of production and delivery.
You're worried about our share now, but that's trivial in the scheme of things. China, India, and Brazil won't always be behind us, and it's only a matter of time before they have the same standard of living we do, with 10x the population. Fix your attention there, if your goal is something other than punishing yourself or your neighbor for imagined sins.
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.
How extremely naive of you.
Here's proof that the IPCC has been uncritically promoting AGW ever since the IPCC was created solely to promote AGW:
IPCC 1990: "... The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more..."
IPCC 1995: "... Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. ..."
See? The IPCC hasn't ever been assessing AGW. Ever since it was created, the IPCC has just been uncritically promoting AGW because that's the entire reason the IPCC exists. Exactly like alien abduction organizations uncritically promoting belief in alien abductions.
Exactly right. What regular people want is feast on cheap oil and gas and cheap food, and give a big "fuck you" to the next generation.
No, what they want is to not be the chumps that cripple their own economy for NO IMPACT on the climate while populations several times their size and polluting more every minute just carry on as usual.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
http://www.climate4you.com/Sun...
On that graph, the solar irradiance varies from 1363 to 1368 since 1978 so under 1/2 of a percent.
That is indeed not really significant.
The sun activity cycle of 11 years is also very visible but it more in the range of 1/10 of a percent.
Glad you asked. Probably about half a dozen times so far. Of course, it's done incrementally and in place, and some of the structure is reused, so you don't usually notice.
For example, in 2013 dollars, the Empire State Building cost about $630M. The owners started a renovation in 2008 that costs nearly the same amount. If Manhattan wouldn't be a good place for this kind of building anymore, people would skip the renovation and just build somewhere else. We wouldn't lose much overall.
In fact, if the Empire State Building weren't so iconic, people might be tearing it down and building a new one in place instead of renovating it. That certainly happens with a lot of other buildings.
I know one thing: if our C02 levels go up, gardening and farming gets a whole lot easier. It's common practice to pump CO2 into greenhouses in order to optimize growth of tomatoes, peppers, etc...
Ironic that they complain about "greenhouse gasses". Humankind's perfect answer to this problem is to for everyone to plant a garden. That will not only make us healthier but will have an actual effect on our relationship to the "energy crisis", resulting in a lot less transportation of goods.
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.
1/2 of a percent (so +/-0.005) is not an increase but the distance between the maximum and the minimum observed since 1978.
Looking at the trend over multiple years (the dark red line), I only see the regular 11 years cycle with a variation of about 1/10 of a percent. The variation to the trend if any is well below that value.
Third option: Non-carbon generated electricity that is cheaper than carbon. (That's an economic, as in real, 'cheaper', not tax/subsidy to make it cheaper)
So, modern nuclear power it is. Start mass producing CANDU reactors (CANDU 6es and ACR-1000s) around the world while pushing ahead with research to convert them to using Thorium so we never run dry. Put them everywhere that needs power and that can't use geothermal. Standardize on common-sense, workable regulations (starting with eliminating any stupid anti-reprocessing rules) and plow through any NIMBY BS put up by local ignorant fools. Within 20 years, you'll have replaced all fossil fuel electricity production with something that actually works and provides plenty of power for everyone.
So the cheap electricity option is not even really an option, is it?
Sure it is. It requires a huge up-front cash investment for construction, but running costs are quite low. Complete the work to replace other fuels with Thorium and you've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 years of power for the entire planet at current rates of use. Increase usage by two orders of magnitude and we're down to maybe 1,000 years if we never put another penny into energy R&D.
Oh darn.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
A nation of couch potatoes looks up at you briefly, small strings of spittle pendant from their slack jaws, then turn their blank eyes back to the latest American Idol or Survivor episode. They are Nero. The TV is the fiddle. The government is the very essence of corrupt Rome. Or, if you like, McDonald's is the bread, and TV the circus. The problem is, as it has been for some time, is that modern Americans are absolutely immune to critical thinking, and are in no way concerned about it. This is why our society is crumbling around us with regard to our rights, liberties, property, responsibility and future prospects.
Welcome to the last stage of failure of a constitutional republic: unsustainable grab-it-all oligarchy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
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.
It's the pre-emptive dirty debating tactic of getting in first and accusing somebody else of what you yourself are doing so that their accusations look like "no you did that not me" playground arguments.
You see it a lot from the science denial crowd and others with no shame.
They also like to go on about the money spent on climate science as funding propaganda when the reality is wandering science deniers on lecture tours are making more money than any Nobel prize winning scientist ever did.
Right, because when people want action on climate change, they're somehow not doing it to stop the extinction of species and save natural landscapes? Really?
And really, oygenation agents are your boogieman here? Guess what? They *do* reduce emissions. The use of oygenation agents has roughly contributed as much to reducing non-CO2 emissions as tighter emissions standards on cars, give or or take depending on the emission in question. The reduction in mileage isn't because you burn more gasoline, it's simply becaue the oxygenation agents don't contain as much energy as gasoline does.
You're then conflating all oxygenation agents together and totally screwing up in the process. The groundwater chemical you're thinking of MTBE. Yes, it's an oxygenate, but the main reason it was added was as an anti-knock agent. You know what it replaced? Tetraethyl lead. Now, MTBE groundwater contamination isn't a good thing, but it's sure a heck of a lot better than lead contamination. And MTBE is steadily being phased out in favor of cleaner anti-knock agents.
No oxygenation agent is perfect, they all have their drawbacks in specific fields. But overall the environmental benefits indisputably way outweigh the drawbacks. Unless you like lung damage and cancer, that is.
Now, having some level of oxygenates (a few percent) should be a no-brainer, to everyone who's not an idiot that is, and they have little measurable effect on fuel economy. The actual debate comes in when you start adding way more than is necessary to control pollution - for example, E10 and E15. These are more examples of trying to get people to burn an alternative fuel - which is primarily Big Ag, not environmentalists, who by and large strongly dislike corn ethanol.
And lastly, I love the sort of websites you're apparently reading, given your link ;) To get out of the nut-o-sphere: the meadow-jumping-mouse is only endangered because its land has been heavily overgrazed by cattle (not just affecting the mice, but everything in the area, even local water supplies). The mouse used to be a keystone species in the area and the bottom of food chains but is now down to 29 small surviving populations. The logical response to the damage in all regards is to stop heavily overgrazing the land - something that the goverment has been working towards in the area for three decades. But I guess everyone has a right to graze land into a barren wasteland, right?
FYI, I live in Iceland where we long ago went down that road. The results aren't good.
The funny thing is, they're only trying to protect the riverbanks from being grazed into oblivion, which should be a no-brainer - the amount of land lost is comparatively quite small. But the guy doesn't even want to have to pipe water to his cattle, he'd much rather have his cattle destroy the riparian environment and drive a species to extinction than run a freaking hose.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
Satellites "measure" temperature of nebulous areas of the atmosphere based on a model of microwave emissions of gases (primarily 02 I think). From that they calculate a temperature. Satellites have to make adjustments for a number of things. Orbital variation, degradation of the instruments, the angle of view of the surface, effects on the microwave emissions by clouds and the background being measured against, land elevation rising into the area of the atmosphere being measured and probably several other things.
Satellite temperature measurements and surface measurements are complimentary. They serve as a check against each other and so far what they show isn't that different.
HadCRUT definitely does include sea surface temperatures.
HadCRUT is the dataset of monthly instrumental temperature records formed by combining the sea surface temperature records compiled by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the land surface air temperature records compiled by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.
If you want to include all possible stations worldwide then BEST is your friend. That's what they did and their findings are significantly different than HadCRUT.
Okay everyone!
Put out all fire.
Cut off all electricity.
Stop all traffic
Oh! Don't forget to hold your breath. Forever.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
A fair amount of starvation has actually been caused by the effort to FIGHT global warming. In particular, the US biofuels mandate was justified as a way to combat global warming - biofuels are alleged to be a carbon-neutral form of energy. But diverting cropland from growing food to growing fuel makes food more expensive. That creates starvation and causes riots and war and refugees. In short, the effort to fight global warming has itself CREATED some of the very problem it claims to be attempting to fight.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
I play Nerd-Folk!
So much nonsense. Stop pretending you care about science - you clearly don't give a rat's ass if you don't like what it (or who) is saying. That is patently clear by your assertions in the final paragraph which are patently false and instantly recognisable as such by anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the material at hand. You fail as a scientist, massively and wholly. You disgust me.
You don't wait for a doctor to be 99.99% sure about the day you will die before accepting any treatment, you trust that they will make a good guess based on limited observations they have.
I encourage all climate denialists to get at least 4, maybe 5-sigma certainty on any cancer diagnosis before taking any action. Cancer treatments are expensive after all, and you should wait until you're really, really, super duper extra sure you have it!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Wow, who said we have to return to 1700s lifestyles to go carbon-neutral? We just have to change what all that stuff runs on, it's not that difficult or expensive.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Big ocean upwellings/sinks; El Nino/La Nina are the opposite peaks of an oscillation in the Pacific ocean. Why would we expect only one peak to cause a climate disruption?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you want to accuse the HadCRUT team of fudging the numbers, hence your putting "adjustments" in scare quotes, kindly provide evidence.
Your choice of loolking at tropical temperatures and excluding polars is utterly disingenuous.
Nope, this is a HOAX, there is no such thing as an atmosphere or oceans !! This is all a hoax set up by the IPCC and a worldwide conspiracy of climate scientists aiming to tax and take away the guns of the hard working US citizen!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
You have your opinion about which scientists have valid opinions, I have mine. Thus we part ways. Compelling data requires no advocates - e.g. I went quickly from scoffing at dark matter to believing the WIMP model whole-heartedly based on the CMBR data, which had nothing to do with the opinion of any given scientist. Such data may yet emerge for a particular climate model that stands out from the crowd, but as yet none have distinguished themselves even from the null hypothesis.
On a fundamental level why do you trust your judgement more than the people whom have been studying it full time for years or decades?
Do you think them to be incompetent? Unethical? It just strikes me as exceptionally arrogant to place so much faith in your own reasoning that you'd completely discount the opinions of one of the smartest and most honest groups on the planet.
And to be honest if you talked about Mullis because also buy into AIDS denialism then you need to step back and seriously reassess how you evaluate evidence.
I stole this Sig
Whilst humans are engaging in destructive behaviour on this planet in so many ways, global warming per se is a natural phenomenon - not man made.
If you believe the theory that dinosaurs once roamed the earth, then you probably believe that the earth was warm at that time. Then the Dinosaurs were supposedly killed off by an ice age.
So... Are we still in an ice age?
No. The earth got warmer, and is still getting warmer.
Let's see.. warm temperatures.. cooler.. colder.. colder.. ice age... warming...warmer...warmer.. hot
Do you see a pattern emerging here Scully?
Time for Al Gore and his fear-mongering band of "warmists" to cool down and move along... and take their "global carbon tax" scheme with them.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.