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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."
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.
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.
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.
Instead of listening to hyperbole why don't you peruse the actual scientific literature on those subjects? You won't find any of that in the time frames you contemplate.
Some environmentalists will blame anything they can on AGW. That doesn't mean that the science itself is wrong, and that it isn't a pressing problem. It just means that there are partisan hacks (people just like you) on the opposite side of the issue to you. They are stupid. So what.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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.
Plagues are natural. Eradicating them is artificial. Saying "changes are not natural" is like saying "warmth in the winter is not natural" and then breaking all the windows in your house on the coldest day of the year. I realize you think "natural" is synonymous with perfect holiness and righteousness, but this is a science topic, so please keep your arguments rational.
The IPCC has stated that sea level rise this century will likely be in the neighborhood of 2.6 feet or less but that extreme conditions could cause as much as a 6.5 foot rise in sea levels over the next hundred years. Maybe you are referring to Al Gore's propaganda where he stated a bunch of US cities could soon be underwater in the near future. You must remember Al Gore is a politician and as such, if his lips move, he's lying.
Really ? That's what I must remember ?
It couldn't be James Hansen predicting the West Side Highway would be under water by 2005 ?
http://www.salon.com/2001/10/2...
The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”
Are you trying for the Logical Fallacy of the Year Award here?
The fact that it's getting warmer isn't proof that AGW is correct; at best, it's proof that it might not be completely wrong. I'm not saying that you're guilty of that fallacy, but I've seen many posts here by AGW fanatics that essentially say exactly that.
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Conservatives need to come to the table with solutions
You need problems first in order to have solutions. For example, this article is about how 1.5 C rise in temperature is supposed to be bad with all sorts of "negative impacts", but there's no actual evidence for the claim. Providing solutions to non-problems doesn't help anyone.
Nor do we have a sane plan for keeping temperature rise below 1.5 C. Note that you won't get the US, China, Russia, or OPEC on board.
I'm sorry that you have so much trouble understanding simple English. I don't care how you twist it, the fact that the climate is getting warmer (Something that only a completely closed-mind denier would argue about.) isn't proof by itself that AGW is correct.
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No, it would be called science.
(A) We've known the mechanism since the 1800s when Fourier et al first raised warnings about CO2s spectral absorbsion lines and the implication the coal spewing industrial revolution might have on atmosphere. This is validated science and underwrites so much physics that we'd have to turn the clock back on at least a century of scientific understanding in multiple fields if it wasn't true.
(B) We have a solid graps of how much CO2 is being put into the atmosphere from both economic modelling and satelite and terrestrial telemetry.
(C) This permits us to do a back of the napkin calculation as to how much energy (thermal and kinetic) is being added to the climate system from human intervention (its a lot).
(D) This in turn gives rise to more complicated modelling that can tell us how much of that energy goes to warming, how much to increased kinetic activity (cyclones/etc), how much gets absorbed by the ocean and how much radiates back out.
(E) The end result both matches up with observation (And *n o* natural process can account for what we are seeing. Volcanic activity is incredibly insubstantial. Even krakatoa hardly put a dent in it. And solar activity is also quite minor).
Occams razor says we *must* conclude humans are causing substantial climate change, because if they are not we have to find a mechanism that (A) Prevents physics from working as it is known, and (B) Makes it look like physics is working as it is known. Should this be found, it would be Nobel prize level monumental. However, as they say, big claims require big proof, and that proof is not remotely forthcoming.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
If your theory is so wonderfully complete, why can't you create a computer model that can start with conditions twenty years ago and work out a correct description of the present? Please note, I'm not denying that it's getting warmer. I simply don't subscribe to the current hubris that makes humanity responsible for all of it.
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