Slashdot Mirror
Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient
An anonymous reader points out that a long held goal of keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius might not be good enough. "A long-held benchmark for limiting global warming is 'utterly inadequate,' a leading U.N. climate scientist declared. Keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising past 2 degrees Celsius – a cap established by studies in the early 1970s – is far too loose a goal, Petra Tschakert, a professor at Penn State University and a lead author of an assessment report for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a commentary published in the journal Climate Change Responses. Already, with an average increase of just 0.8 degrees Celsius, she wrote, 'negative impacts' are 'widespread across the globe.' Tschakert called for lowering the warming target to 1.5 degrees Celsius."
Here is a link to the complete, actual commentary from which all the other stories derive.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wasn't it supposed to raising 2 degrees/decade yy now ?
Aren't the poles supposed to be ice free by now ?
Isn't Florida supposed to be underwater ?
Isn't the entire east coast supposed to be rubble from super hurricanes ?
Dustbowls that would make the 1930s look like nothing ?
Really enough of the chicken little.
Am I giving up my Canyonero. You socialist hippy scum.
Considering that Milankovitch cycles show the earth's recent temperature swings are significantly more than 1.5 degrees WITHOUT impact from man, this seems a bit nutty. Global climate change has been happening for a long time before man started burning fossil fuels. Sure it sucks for some, but then again, it will be sweet for some people who get benefits from such a change. Life goes on, just like it has in the past ice ages, despite 1000 metre thick glaciers covering much of Europe and N. America.
Earth is not a static closed system folks... It changes shitloads more all by itself then any amount attributed to by even the most generous of climate analysts. Get used to it. Buy a vineyard in England.
Less well known perhaps is a critique from feminist social scientists who interrogate what may be deemed ‘acceptable’ and what may be ‘dangerous’, and for whom, and who contest the global community as a homogeneous entity. Joni Seager, for instance, demonstrates how notions of acceptability always mirror ‘a prism of privilege, power, and geography’ [14]. She argues that those for whom a 2C target [are] politicians and economists from the global North deeply entrenched in a masculinized rationality that nature can be controlled and that in the imminent climate race with inevitable winners and losers they will be among the former. Seager rejects the notion of a 2C target as a real geophysical threshold that neatly distinguishes between little and much danger
That is worth a read for educational purposes alone.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you want to stop CO2 increase then you have to tax fossil fuels.
A lot, and then, a lot more. How else do you stop fossil fuel usage, ask nicely?
Anyone got a better idea?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Either 2 degrees or 1.5 it doesn't really matter as we're going to go sailing by both of them and keep on going by a wide margin. We've started to late and done too little to even meet the 2 degree goal. And the commitments that are being proposed for the upcoming summit in France later this year don't look like they are going to be enough.
I don't understand how a scientist can a talk about a "2 degrees goal", that's such a stupid metric.
There's so much we don't know about the climate, and so much momentum that it's just meaningless.
What happens when we reach that 2 degrees? Well probably nothing. And even if we all of the sudden say "Stop everything, we're at 2 degrees!" and somehow manage to do it, it's not going to stop because we want it to just like that. It's not a static system.
We don't know (precisely) the impact of an increase in temperature on the system, we don't know the model of the system except that it is complex and we don't know how it's going to evolve, and yet we fix an arbitrary value that we have no way to keep as a goal?
Insufficient for what? Their pocketbooks? Climate change is a fraud. The notion that you can express control on climate through political structures is nutty.
an ill wind that blows no good
Is global warming really that bad for *everyone*? Wouldn't it allow longer growing seasons closer to the arctic and antarctic? So a few cities near the shore have to be relocated, Earth has been warm before. Am I missing something?
It's too late. A billion or two or three will die. So it goes.
Some old sayings...
You have to run two times faster just to stay in the same place.
Predicting the future based on the past is like driving based on the rear view mirror.
---
United we stand, divided we fall.
"We" in that case are the humans.
As patriotic Americans, Chinese and Russians, we will die by the millions. United as humans we might have a chance.
Actually, I'm sorry to say that, but patriotic people are like crazy pilots. Do the math.
(*) I'm not against loving one's own country, provided there will be an Earth in the future for the country to be in...
These stories are tiring as there is no chance for "settled science fact" in climate change.
All of these estimates are based on elaborate math models and yet the Earth's long term climate ON ITS OWN, has swung widely over recorded history.
And from the geologic history, we know we will again go into another ice age based on the history of the change in the Earth-Sun orbit & precession changes on a regular 110,000 year cycle. And without human intervention, the ice age ends.
So for more than 17 years, the "global" average near-surface temperature change has been 0 C/month, 0 C/year and 0 C/decade, a trifecta!
And CO2 in ppm has increased by 20 ppm on average, from about 380 ppm to about 400 ppm, respecting the seasonal swing.
Lets just get it out of our system that CO2 concentration does not have anything to do with near-surface temperature change, i.e. sensitivity is ZERO.
So I would say the "2 degrees goal" has already been reached because, "Uh, [It] Doesn't Matter."
Hay! The IPCC ... like the UN and the UNFCC ... receive U.S.A. Federal Dollars!
Ah Ha! Therefore IPCC and UNFCC and UN employees are required to abide by Title IX as well as anyone doing "volunteer work".
Oh Boy the court battles that will create!
Yee Haa
Won't someone please think of our grandchildren's grandparents?
She's a Geography professor.
So why would I care about her opinion on global warming, either way?
#DeleteChrome
"Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money." (source).
If AGW is real and the global temperature is to rise unmitigated, the rich (who actually own the planet) will actually start doing something about that only when war comes knocking on their front doors.
Up until then there will be no tangible changes to prevent further warming of the Earth.
this ain't.
From what I've heard scientist in the 80s came up with 1 C before serious changes would kick in. Then some economists decided that the damages could be managed until we reach 2C. So the 2C is an economic goal. Interestingly at ~0.9C we already see permafrost melting and decaying which could leed to some feedback effect that could ultimatley dwarf our contribution. So that article may be overly inconservative with its 1.5C goal.
Je me souviens.
OK, so where's the scientific proof of what is the Earth's proper temperature?
We can see that we've warmed up since the Little Ice Age. What is the natural temperature for the planet?
Citation needed.
The basic physics of climate change is that increasing levels of gases trap more energy from the sun, increasing the amount of energy in our atmosphere and climate system. We know by and large, most of the energy is stored in the oceans as water holds energy much better than gases in the air.
With such a simple observation, I'd like to make the observation that it seems too few of the IPCC guys pushing for policy stuff are paying any attention to the energy budget. Instead, we have the only basis scientifically being that the average surface temperature is warming, and CO2 levels are rising and we are the ones pushing them up. That's all well and good, and they are important observations. About 30 years ago though we started sending up satellites to measure incoming and outgoing radiation. The ERBS and CERES programs from NASA have given us direct measurements of trends in the overall energy balance at the edge of space. The most direct measurement of global warming that we can have. The summary from each program, has let us find a decade level average energy imbalance, and we've found it is in good or at least general agreement with energy levels measured via Ocean Heat Content observations.
Here's the important bit though. As the IPCC's most recent AR has observed, the satellite measurements show that for the duration of the CERES project, there has been NO TREND in the energy imbalance. The earlier ERBS data showed the same as well. Our satellite measurements have shown significant and very steady trends in energy balance cycling monthly, but the average over the years and decades we've measured is just a steady and consistent average neither shifting noticeably up or down. Meanwhile, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over that same time have climbed like nobody's business. All our models and expectation for X degrees of warming for so much CO2 kinda hinges pretty heavy on CO2 pushing up the energy imbalance. If it's not, and observations suggest that. We may not need to be so worried as some of the panic ridden crowd wants.
Before I get citation needed shoved down my throat, here's a peer reviewed journal article published in Geophysical Research Letters. It is comparing observed atmosphere energy imbalance to the CMIP5 model runs. It finds good agreement, but also makes the very notable observation that the energy imbalance trend is dominated by volcanic activity(ie NOT the CO2 levels that are higher than they've been in millenia). Full abstract:
Observational analyses of running 5 year ocean heat content trends (Ht) and net downward top of atmosphere radiation (N) are significantly correlated (r~0.6) from 1960 to 1999, but a spike in Ht in the early 2000s is likely spurious since it is inconsistent with estimates of N from both satellite observations and climate model simulations. Variations in N between 1960 and 2000 were dominated by volcanic eruptions and are well simulated by the ensemble mean of coupled models from the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). We find an observation-based reduction in N of 0.31±0.21Wm2 between 1999 and 2005 that potentially contributed to the recent warming slowdown, but the relative roles of external forcing and internal variability remain unclear. While present-day anomalies of N in the CMIP5 ensemble mean and observations agree, this may be due to a cancelation of errors in outgoing longwave and absorbed solar radiation.
Of COURSE it isn't sufficient.
When - ever - has an activist said "yeah, well, what's being done is pretty much good, yeah. I'm happy. I guess I don't have much to be upset about any more"?
Here's a hint: if there's one thing I can guarantee the climate won't do, is be static.
-Styopa
...that fingers Israel as the primary threat to women and to the world in general, not Iran, Boko Haram, ISIS, or whatever club of nutjobs has pulled off this week's biggest massacre or sale of young girls, is it not?
The UN is trash. It is useless, and no one should care what it has to say. Especially in "climate science" because they are the same outfit whose outed emails proved they were mucking up the incoming data to fit their requirements and whose "investigation" exonerated the people responsible and left them running the UN IPCC!
So stop with the UN nonsense. They are of less use than the League of Nations, and far more expensive.
Reading the reactions I find it amazing how many climate experts there are on slashdot.
-- Cheers!
To be fair, the 0.8 degree rise we've had so far is accompanied with very many positive effects too. It's no good to simply say some bad things will happen, you must at least show that the bad will outweigh the good.
Our 2 degree goals is achievable! Quick, make up some new fear-mongering "prediction" to ensure sufficient panic and a constant source of funding!
happening in part of Florida, and part of Virginia (or Maryland it is hard to keep track).
the aquifers are drained and the land above them sinks down
Here is an example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... (hunting quotas, protected species, ...)
The Nazis attached a high value to the land, which must be protected from both pollution and "inferior races".
They did think forward, after all, the third reich was supposed to last a full millennium. So yes, maybe some of their ideas were a bit misguided to say the least but they did think long term.
The anti-tobacco movement was another thing the Nazis did right : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius
s/above/more than/
It is curious that those that tend to see climate change as a urgent problem, tend to advocate cultural solutions, whereas those that see climate change as a less urgent problem tend to advocate technological solutions. The irony being that technological solutions are generally reasonably quick to invent and implement, whereas cultural solutions often take a human generation or more to take hold. For the all talk of a climate change apocalypse, technology got us into this mess and technology will get us out of it. Also don't underestimate the inventiveness of capitalism, its not very good at solving problems that will affect the next generation, but is highly focused at solving problems that affect us right now and have a direct monetary cost associated with them.
A recent study which actually looked at the climate concluded that the maximum the climate can change is about 1.45 degrees.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
Don't expect it to be quoted in AR6 because it effectively puts a verification now on climate models. If the climate model says >2 degrees, then it's within the 99% error range, therefore the author has some entropy problems with their code ;)
What they're trying to say, using the usual feminist sociology over-loquatiousness is:
For some on the planet, keeping it under 2 degrees will preserve a relatively familiar or at least acceptable quality of life.
For others on the planet, quality of life can only be preserved by keeping it under, say 1.5 degrees, or even one degree.
The first group (that can live with a higher threshold) are those in the upper portions of the global economic scale, and it's an acceptable rise for them because they can also afford technologies and tools (getting crude, say, air conditioners, new home materials, new kinds of agricultural output, etc.) that make a 2 degree rise tolerable.
The second group (that can't live at the 2 degree threshold, and really need a lower one) are going to tend to be in the lower portions of the global economic scale, who won't have access to the technologies and tools that make a 2 degree rise livable for those at the top of the scale.
Policymakers and scientists tend, by virtue of their privileged position, to be in the first group, and have thus set the 2 degree rise in connection with thinking of their own, best-case lifestyles, rather than—say—a member of one of the globe's largely impoverished equatorial populations without access to much in the way of resources, tools, or technologies already.
It's a good point: the effects are not uniform, and if 2 degrees is the upper bound for the people who are the globe's *most* comfortable, then it's probably a bad upper bound in general, because it will "cook" (even more than already occurs) those that are the *least* comfortable.
It was, however, bad language and clarity—which is a sin that social science commits far too often.
Their point is well taken:
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well, yes, but you really shouldn't bring up the favorable consequences in order to fight Global Warming.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Warming of the Earth doesn't happen instantaneously. After emitting some CO2 (or other greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere, it takes quite some time before the Earth finishes warming up.
Right now, the Earth has experienced a little more than half of the warming that will eventually result from the present concentration of CO2. That basically means that if we stop emitting all CO2 and other greenhouse gasses tomorrow, the Earth would very likely still hit 1.5C of warming.
But the authors are very much correct that the 2C goal isn't safe by any means. Current model estimates are that the ice sheet of Greenland will destabilize and completely melt at somewhere close to 2C of warming. That would cause approximately 7 meters of sea level rise, in addition to all of the other sources of sea level rise (note: it'd take a few hundred years for Greenland to melt, but even relatively small amounts of sea level rise can be devastating). There's a fair amount of uncertainty here. Greenland might not destabilize until warming of 2.5C. Or it might start occur right at 2C. It would be far, far better to never find out.
2C is primarily a goal just because reasonable and cost-effective but aggressive measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions can (at present) allow us to reach a 2C target. We really wouldn't have to sacrifice much of anything to reach a 2C target (and the extra construction of renewable energy infrastructure would be a boon to many economies who are currently struggling). But we would have to overturn the massive influence of the fossil fuel lobby both on government and on the public discourse.
You can say it -- the question is, can you show it? Take a look at the actual data and you will see that although the average is running a little warm, all of 2012, 2013, 2014 and what we've had thus far of 2015 are just about devoid of record temperature excursions.
My understanding is that it is lack of precipitation -- not high temperatures -- that account for California's current problems. Which you can also see on that same page on the bottom graph. The span from March through October is devoid of precipitation. In the background in the darker color, you can see the "normal" (the average) for the region.
Dustbowl, anyone? Much, much worse than California's problems -- and definitely not attributable to "global warming" in any significant way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But not newly underwater. Sea levels have risen about 200 mm, or about 7.8 inches in the last century (1910 to 2008) (also, the rate of rise hasn't changed much, either -- see linked graph again.) Which time period has to include almost all, or perhaps all, of Florida's sewer infrastructure -- Miami was officially incorporated as a city with a population of just over 300 on July 28, 1896. Fort Lauderdale was incorporated even later -- 1911. This tells us quite handily that region's sewage infrastructure was built during that 7.8 inch rise.
So if Florida's infrastructure is seeing drainage run backwards due to an 8 inch change in levels, that is clearly related to absolutely dismal design and implementation -- not to sea level rise. I mean, good grief. What do you think the design criteria were? "If anything at ALL happens, sewers should overflow?" Please refer to the actual data when making claims. Also: If your public officials have been telling you that this is due to sea level rise, they are lying through their teeth, and you should take them to task for it. Good luck with that.
Yes, no doubt. But they aren't fighting with sea level rise. They're fighting with incompetence.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not when the change is so slow that you have generations to decide to move away from it, or alter your investments, it isn't. Every generation typically goes into new homes. Somewhere. Eventually, a generation (not this one or any one soon) will go... "y'know honey, instead of moving here in Miami, let's check out Vermont." Or where ever.
And you know what's kind of irritating? I never hear anyone going on about sea level rise mention this little fact: Change is the hottest possible breeding ground for opportunity. Change means employment, undertakings, recovery, rehabilitation, relocation, new methods, new ideas, new crops, new businesses. And so on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They also tried (through genetics as DNA wasn't theorized) to bring back extinct animals - eg the Auroch. They were partially successful.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
We won't even stop at 10 Deg C. The only thing that will stop the rising temperature is the fact that most of us will be dead.
For a well stated, articulate, position, well reasoned reasoned and supported-by-cite)!
Would that there were more like this on "/." .
Yes, and Ghenkis Khan also had a measurable effect on the environment, as forests regrew in the wake of his conquests:
http://carnegiescience.edu/new...
But really, liberals and conservatives really want the same thing... more wealth by reducing the competition for resources. One proposes using economic market forces, the other proposes reducing the competition with military forces. Either way, we win. Unless you lose. But then, you're dead, so you're part of the solution, so... yay?!
Looking forward to next months article "we are actually already dead".
Keep pumping that dogma! You can still squeeze a few more pennies out of the rubes before even they see you for the charlatans you are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All IPCC group reports are finalised via political negotiation except for one group. WG1 is the scientific group, all the others refer back to the WG1 report for factual information, the other groups argue about how to present those facts in their own working group(WG). In 25yrs of incredibly intense scrutiny, nobody has ever found a factual error in the final versions of a WG1 report. That really is a very robust outcome and a credit to the scientists involved.
Only nations that donate to the IPCC budget get a vote on the other reports, last I checked there were ~135 nations who together represent pretty much every political view in the rainbow, it takes a long time for them to agree. The IPCC budget is $5-6M/yr, nobody who actually works on the reports is paid a dime by the IPCC, all of the scientists involved DONATE their time. Their financial accounts are on their web site. Try finding the accounts for an anti-science no-think-tank such Senator Inhofe's barking dog - the heartland institute.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Jogging to the left at times, particularly when you may be stepping of a cliff on your right, can be great for survival, assuming of course that survival is even any longer an option for any of us for long. A couple of hundred years as a species, if we are lucky?
From the perspective of a professional biologist, let us only hope we can soon find our wits rather than our glaringly obvious limits.
There has been so much to the degradation of the natural world by humanity, that there can be little doubt in anyone's mind that the relative fragile and brittle, biotic skin of life that we depend on for own own sustenance and that of our families has been greatly diminished over the age of human presence.
We like to think of passing on our genes to the next generation, perpetuating our own mortality as it were. Although this will be the closest we can ever get to immortality, the unfortunate answer to the question we must now ponder, thanks to our collective thoughtless, is whether those of our children be even able to survive in the future. Of course, we will be gone before we find out. That seems like such a hollow epitaph for humanity.
Do you think if we save some of our own DNA, the robots of the future will even want us back?
The reason is that the liberals in the west are allowing all other nations, ESP. CHINA, to continue growing their emissions. Even if America went to ZERO EMISSIONS TODAY, it would not change anything.
The ONLY way to solve this is to have ALL NATIONS STOP growing their emissions, and esp. stop building new coal plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
is whether we can figure out a way to avoid it as we go about destroying it through lack of knowledge about biology and planetary science on the part of the average citizen.
Yet at a time, we need even more scientists, republicans are slashing funds for education at all levels from pre-K on the Mississippi Delta to graduate study at the world's most prestigious universities. However, people shouldn't look to the media to educate themselves. After all, whats the point, if you've just enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks.
In the end, you have to deal with ignoramus. You think they would be inarticulate ogres, but no. These are people who have some degree, but don't master any kind of logic, don't know about statistic significance, confuse society established conventions with natural laws and, like in the present case, are unable to assess mankind role in screwing Earth or in recovering its health by doing the little we can, however we can -- not that I underestimate the risks, but right now the people that usually oppose against man intervention -- the ecologists -- are the ones asking for something to be done before it's too late.
Some people, you'd spend a life arguing with them. They are the kind that will defend to death the use of gasoline, because that's what they're used to; had we kept using electric vehicles like in the first cars, those same folks would argue to death that we don't need no stinkin' petrol.
I'm not advocating tyranny; there has to be a democratic discussion... but think if we needed to discuss the shape of plugs and electric outlets -- for how many decades would the discussions linger?
Jobs did had enormous success because he figured that out: create a great product and give it to the masses -- and they'll adore you. Ask what they want and see your reputation go down in flames.
These trolls are absolutely certain that nothing will happen to them if they contribute to maintain the status quo and hold any initiative to dimnish man's impact. Surely they will suffer if things go wrong like everybody else; maybe some are already buying things and making investments to become richer when disaster strikes; maybe they're just saying to everyone to take their time, so that they can jump ahead and get the things which might become scarce.
They are 100% sure -- and I even agree with them -- that when the worse comes, nobody will have the time to take them to judgement and punish them, for the situation will be so troubling and they will always be able to say they were engaging in democratic discussion -- when in truth they are just making a very big filibuster, one that will cost us dearly. Wars may arise from that.
And what for? For pleasure. To know they can derail something. To pose as nonchalant. To participate in causing a great disaster, because they cannot build anything and destroying is so much easier.
"We know by and large, most of the energy is stored in the oceans as water holds energy much better than gases in the air."
Where's the accounting for energy stored in: Living organisms, the ground, etc? (EVERYTHING more dense than air will store energy better than air)
How much energy gets stored in plants and animal populations?
How much energy gets stored in the "sun-baked" rocks and soil?
How do these compare with the seas?
NONE of this stuff can actually be precisely measured, so it gets estimated... which is very convenient if, when running out of excuses, one wants to point to the seas and say "THAT's were the heat went!" (as though it's something different that would not have had the same energy storage capacity during all previous climatic cycles).
The seas should play the same role in EVERY inter-glacial warming period and therefore should have been in the cllimate models and therefore the current "warming pause" should have been predicted by those models - this is just another reason why models that cannot predict known past events when fed past data should not be trusted.
Governments, which have FAR MORE money than "Big Oil" AND which also have guns, prisons, and armies, give FAR MORE money world-wide (BILLIONS) to scientists for studies that support AGW and also gang-up to form completely artificial international committees (IPCC ring any bells?) to halp make it seem like even more "independent" entities support the theories that justify more taxes and more control over populations and individuals... all at the behest of the billionaires who fly private jets to places like Davos to chat about which politicians they should back in elections.
No foil hats are needed; we have an example right before our eyes: The super-rich Davos crowd (Soros, Gates, Buffet, etc) LOVED Obama and backed him for president twice - and he's been using the EPA, FDIC, IRS, and other entities to control the US economy in a manner that has dramatically boosted the wealth gap between rich and poor to levels not seen before, while the super-rich continue to buy even more (faster and more luxurious) private jets, larger estates, bigger super-yachts, etc. EVERY ONE of these super-rich freaks is a huge advocate for AGW and big funder of the studies and reports but NONE of them live like they believe in ANY of it.
Look, we already know that global warming is happening and that it is caused or aggravated by human activities, and whatever we do to mitigate it, we will have to live with the consequences for a long time - thousands of years. So, the sensible thing to do under all circumstances, is to learn to live with it - and another sensible thing to do is to try to predict as best we can, what the consequences will be. There will most likely be huge migrations away from arid countries, for one thing, and unless we want to have all out war against desperate people, who have nothing to lose, we will need to find a way to integrate them. It is not unlikely that we will need to abandon some of the lower-lying areas if the seas-level rises, and so on.
There are still very good reasons to stop doing the things that cause massive disruption of our environment - we have to face up to the fact that we as a species have a huge impact on this planet. We have managed to almost completely cut down natural forest in most of the places we live, we routinely change the course of rivers, build dams, strip mine whole mountains, decimate fish stocks etc. How anybody can imagine that this won't have a serious impact on the way we live at some point is beyound me.
Incredibly, there are still people - intelligent and well-informed people, even - who refuse to accept that our current lifestyle is causing massive issues that can't simply be addressed with a bit of half-hearted recycling; we need to learn to economise our resources. According recent statistics, supermarkets throw out huge amounts of food unsold, and on top of that, people discard about half of what they have bought; to my limited understanding of maths, that means we could save hugely on the environment just by learning not to waste so much - without actually cutting back on our real consumption. In short: we can make a big difference simply by not being idiots.
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which is why they renamed it 'climate change', which means absolutely nothing, but is MEANT to be taken to mean 'catastrophic man-made global warming' every single time it's used by the alarmists. How dishonest of them.
http://business.financialpost.com/2015/03/27/lawrence-solomon-global-warming-doomsayers-take-note-earths-19th-little-ice-age-has-begun/
The only people saying that it "should have" done that are deniers, though. He's listening to the ramblings of denier fringe lunatics who actually pretend that the climate predictions are those things and that they haven't happened, therefore the climate predictions are wrong.
The big problem is that no such predictions have been made. Made up, yes. Made? Not so much.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/15/another-ipcc-modeling-failure-so-thats-where-the-atmospheric-methane-went/
The IPCC has been predicting a methane apocalypse for decades now with their scary models. See the graph in the link above.
Yet nature fails to cooperate, with methane levels in the ppb area always way below the IPCC model predictions.
The actual methane cycle is too complicated for their simple models to get right, too many natural sinks and sources that (like CO2) dwarf the human contributions.
The jig is up for the alarmists...the temps are flatlined, there is no increase in scary supposed "extreme weather", the alarmist models are diverging farther from the actual temps, despite massive manipulation and adjustments to the temperature records. Many new papers are published with lower measurement of the climate sensitivity (temp rise per CO2 doubling), calling into question the speculative IPCC models based on trumped up high climate sensitivity values for political reasons.
for instance Morner did a study where he looked for - basically - the world's best historical tide gauge. (geologically stable, no land subsidence, post-glacial rebound, continental shelf issues etc.) that has records going way back.
he identified one in Croatia, I vaguely recall.
Anyway, the oceans have been rising there since the started recording ( in the 19th century) with no acceleration at all.
Advent of fossil fuels? no effect
amazing the number of people that post about this topic without understanding the basics
Wow. The way humanity is going at this is completely wrong, and no one is talking about the real cause of global climate change. The real cause is animal husbandry for the purpose of producing meat. The planet can sustain 10 billion humans, but it cannot support the 80 billion farm animals that go with animal production for human consumption. The numbers are staggering: the transportation sector is responsible for 13% of greenhouse gas emission. The greenhouse gas emission for the meat industry is estimated between 31 and 50%. But Greenpeace and Sierra Club are too busy collecting money from the american public to actually attack the real issue and piss off meat eaters that might mean less donations for them. I did my part and went vegan, setting an example to my family of 4 (my wife and the kids are totally free to eat what they want and I will cook them meat if they ask, but they more and more choose to eat what I prepare for myself). I am not worried, though. The planet can take care of itself, and when we disappear, nature will start again with less selfish creatures like ants or termites. They are as good architects as we are and seem to be able to exist without threatening the entire ecosystem. If you like numbers, check-out http://www.cowspiracy.com/ you'll have a good starting point to understand the issue.
Many new studies are coming in with lower values 0.8 - 1.5C/doubling.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/25/the-collection-of-evidence-for-a-lower-climate-sensitivity-continues-to-grow-now-up-to-14-papers-lower-than-ipcc/
Many of the higher sensitivity numbers from the alarmists are for political value.
Even the latest IPCC is backing away for quoting a sensitivity because of lack of consensus.
https://climatism.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/greenpeace-co-founder-no-evidence-global-warming-is-caused-by-humans/
You mean they breed animals to be more like their distance extinct genetic cousins? That is interesting.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yes, and Ghenkis Khan kicked ass. But there is a difference between a side-effect and a purposeful philosophy with a commitment to making something happen.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Someone needs to move first, and I think China has a pretty good argument that the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm from 1960 to 2015 is about 80% attributable to Western society. No wonder they're waiting for the West to stop further increase before they start. Posts like yours give a clear indication that the US will not make this first move.
Suppose you drop a piece of paper in a landfill, and suddenly you get slapped by a bill to clean up 50% of this landfill. Fair?
The Nazis wanted every home to own a car and a television, and of course Hitler ate sugar.
Id have a little more faith in some of this if even a single prediction of the climate change "experts" had actually come to pass.. unfotrunately not a single one has. And you all support dumping hundreds of billions of dollar and restructuring entire economic models (most of which the US tax and rate payers will have to endure) into fighting climate change? Wouldnt it be easier and much mroe cost effective to start incentivizing responsible breeding habits to reduce population growth?
All the negative impacts she ascribes to "global warming" have NOT occurred so far and can NOT be attributed to CO2. The current best estimate of doubling CO2 from 300 to 600 PPM will be an increase in temperature from 0.7 to 1.6 degrees. So now that they have achieved their much proclaimed "less than 2 degrees" they move the goalposts for no sane reason. What a scam.
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
These guys live off the public teet and they will never be satisfied. They need to constantly fear monger or their grant funds will dry up. They won't ever be satisfied until a plague kills off 3/4 of man kind and the rest of us who live are living in caves. Until that happens these guys will not be satified. Here it is almost April and I still have 2 feet of snow in my back yard here in CT. If the globe was 2 degrees colder I don't know what I would do I'm freezing at it is. There has not yet been a day this year, here that has been over 55 degrees.
Paul E. Bahre
This is a political paper quoting the druthers of have-not nations against the more affluent nations, the wishes of feminists and substituting "projected" consequences for real data. The ostensible remedies with 1 degree vs 2 degrees all seem to require massive redistribution of wealth from the US and a clamp on US energy production. There is no mention of such excellent energy solutions a liquid metal thorium reactors.
This is exactly the kind of garbage that passes for climate science.
I'm going to go out on a limb a quote the right wing loon Carl Sagan who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. " So far I see poor sampling going into incomplete models and predicting gloom and doom.
Yes. The story goes that Goering, who was a hunter, was disappointed by the loss of species. He supported genetic scientists to breed the Auroch. This was partially successful and resulted in herds of wild cattle/oxen. They are now completely feral and some populations exist in Germany and Poland.
According to the program I watched, one of the reasons was to hunt them!
I can't find the whole program but there is an excerpt here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR9O7S8VjNY
More on the Aurochs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXXpqhj4P3s
LOL.
First off, the US's output has been dropping for 7 years. Likewise, the west's total output has gone down over the last 10 years, not up. So, the BS about the west not making differences is just that: BS.
Secondly, China's claim is also BS.
Here is the CO2 levels
It took the west from 1959 until 1995 to grow it by 40 PPMs. IOW, it took 36 years to raise it 40, or basically, about 1 PPM / year.
Now, what has happened in the last 20 years? Well, it jumped up by 40 again, which means that we are adding 2 ppm EACH YEAR. However, for the last 5 years, it has increased nearly 3 ppm / year.
The problem is, that the west has cut WAY BACK. ALL OF IT is 1995's level which means that we account for less than 1 ppm (that 1 ppm in 1995, actually included all of the world, but we will simply assume that it was the west).
So, where is the other 2 PPMs coming from? It is coming from the none-western world, of which more than 2/3 of that emissions is China's.
Now, you can continue to make wild claims. You can accept the lies of China's. However, you can NOT change the facts that CO2's massive rise belongs to China, and it is the fact that ppl like yourself do not understand the science or the facts that are happening. Basically, you are no different than the far right wingers that claim that AGW is not occurring. In your case, you refuse to accept the science that shows that the west is not only NOT to blame, but that China's continued growth means that YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR CO2's impact on the globe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Even if America went to ZERO EMISSIONS TODAY, it would not change anything.
Firstly: that's not true. Even though China has a much higher population than the US, the emissions per person in the US are that much higher that the US emits almost as much CO2 as China.
Secondly: The US, as one of the countries with the highest emissions should lead the efforst instead of standing back (or even blocking agreements).
Last but not least: you seem to say: I know climate change is real, I know we caused it. I jus't can't be bothered to actually do something about it. Because that may involve CO2 taxes (OH NO!!), or investing in Solar and Wind power (UGH) or even massively investing in fusion (e.g. the Iter project) (!!!!!)
No. Let's just keep going as we are today. I prefer to close my eyes. When things go wrong we 'll just hope for the best...
First, emissions per capita is a waste of a measurement. The vast majority of Emissions are NOT tied to ppl. They are tied to GDP. Basically, oil based vehicles combined with coal based electricity is where our emissions come from. What is the majority of vehicles used for? Moving ppl/cargo for business, not personal use. Likewise, where does the majority of electricity go? To Business.
Secondly, America's emissions are ALREADY BELOW WHAT WE HAD IN 1995. IOW, we have have been leading it. However, America is not even CLOSE to the high emissions. CHina is.
When you look at this map and see the MASSIVE AMOUNTS of CO2 from China, you should get a sense of how bad things are, and how foolish ppl like you are.
Third, you seem to want to put words in my mouth that I never said or even thought. I fully support a CO2 tax. In fact, I believe that ALL NATIONS need to be smart about this and put on a tax. Interestingly, America is the one major nation that can force ALL OTHER NATIONS ALONG VIA A SMART TAX:
1) all data should be based on REAL numbers, not the made up shit that your silly groups do based on ASSUMPTIONS and NUMBERS FROM GOV. So, we should take OCO2 data and show the CO2 that flows INTO and OUT of a region (basically nations/states). This would show us how much real CO2 is occurring.
2) we need a SMART normalization. Normalizing based on per capita is stupid and foolish. Instead, it should be emissions per $GDP (real $, not PPP). This is because emissions are tied to GDP, not ppl.
3) finally, we tax all goods at a high level. However, the good can be registered and told where the parts (including the final assembly) are from. The WORST part is the % of tax that is applied.
So, lets say that a good is manufactured in say Sweden. It has one of the LOWEST emissions / $GDP. As such, it would have NO TAX. OTOH, if a part comes from China, it would have a 100% of that tax on the good. However, lets say that the worst part comes from say Massachusetts (an American state). Since their emissions per GDP is below average (closer to sweden than to the rest of America, which is average), it would leave a tax of maybe 33-40% of the full rate.
What that does is reward those that bring down their emissions, while punishing those that continue to raise theirs. This is the ONLY way that we can solve this.
Until ppl like you realize that FACTS can not be denied and that science is real, emissions will continue. And I will blame ppl like you, instead of the far right wingers, since you acknowledge the science of AGW, but then turn around and totally ignore the facts associated with it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ok. Then I have misread you. Your first post seemed to suggest that we shouldn't do anything about climate change because it would never work (and reading it back I see some nuance but it still strikes me as such).
The idea that a worldwide CO2 taks could be forced certainly appeals to me. I do not, however, share your revulsion for using CO2 numbers from governments. In fact since CO2 doesn't stop at the borders it will hard to make a model that accurately calculates the CO2 produced in a country (Belgium, e.g. where I live is only about 250 miles from one end to the other and it has the German Ruhr Industrial site, one of the biggers industry concentrations in Europe, close by).
And last but no least: I don't think I ignore the facts around global warming and I am in favor of any measure that could counteract it. Just to be clear: I think we SHOULD make a CO2 taks, that we HAVE to invest in solar and wind power and we MUST massively invest in fusion power. In my Original post I was being sarcastic...
Actually, OCO2's (and hopefully more sats like it), ability is to see how much CO2 is over an area. We can see the generation and we can see what happens as it moves around. It is far more accurate than numbers from govs.. Keep in mind that it is in govs best interest to lie about local coal production, unless there are measurements. For China, they forbid the importing of such instruments, without direct gov permission. I have friends that work on other pollution for America and they went to China to measure. They were allowed to as long as they gave the numbers directly to the gov. What was not known was that they were also measuring the CO2. It is MUCH higher than is generally known. So much higher that they are emitting even more PER CAPITA than America (4 years ago, they were just under America per capita according to their measures). So no. I do NOT trust gov. or groups measurements. That is why I have been wanting OCO2 for a LONG TIME. China's gov and groups can not deny what is shown in that map. And by next year, the numbers will show up to be much worse, even though China's economy is actually tanking.
Fusion will likely not be the answer for another 40 years. At least if it is by ITER. For now, we NEED fission. In particular, we need it to use up all of the 'spent waste'.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.