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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."
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."
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."
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.
California is regularly in drought. It's a 500 year cycle for them.
But good of you to bring it up, If the environmentalists hadn't been blocking water management and in general been in the business of creating problems http://naturalresources.house.....
And yet, the people who study this for a living disagree with you. Weird, right?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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 in other words
You can't lay California's lack of rainfall at warming's feet.
And Environmentalists created the inability to deal with the problem and are obstructing its solution ?
Isn't Florida supposed to be underwater ?
Since you obviously haven't been here for a while, many parts of Florida are underwater at high tide. In Palm Beach and parts of Miami storm drains flow backwards and boat docks are underwater. Just across the inlet, West Palm Beach has a massive project going on to raise sewer lines so toilets will confinue flushing and there are several similar projects in Miami. They're also spending hundreds of millions to reinforce the well casings in the wells Miami gets its freshwater.
Florida is fighting that losing battle quietly. It's not like an area dependent on tourism and investment can announce they're sinking and there's no way to stop it but that's the reality.
Climate deniers are the most ignorant fraction of our society.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"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.
I live in Florida, and that has nothing to do with rising sea levels but rising population levels.
Hint: More paving = More drainage in a rainy climate.
The area of geography she studies is how communities/economies are impacted by and adapt to changes in prevailing climates, which seems pretty relevant, depending on what question you're asking. She would be a poor authority on questions like modeling the impact of CO2 on weather, but more within her area if asking questions like, "how easy/difficult would it be for Indonesians to adapt to a 2" ocean-level rise?".
In terms of the IPCC reports, the research/authorship is divided into three working groups: #1 studies the underlying science; #2 studies impacts & adaptation; #3 studies possible mitigation strategies. She's part of #2.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
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.
yeah why don't you go tax a volcano because just one small eruption is millions of times larger in volume of CO than the entire world production of hydrocarbon fuels... I AM AN IDIOT..
FTFY. Human emissions of CO2 are about 100 times greater than volcanic emissions.
If you judge the science by the ramblings of fringe lunatics, then you're bound to misunderstand the science. There is no credible prediction (established science) that says any of the things you've suggested. Not even remotely close. If you're interested it learning something, then you will need to stop reading the blogs that make you feel warm righteous indignation, and open your mind.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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
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...
Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.
The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.
When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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
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.”
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.
So you believe runoff got so bad it raised the level of the ocean? WOW.
Sounds more like you'll make yourself believe nearly anything to avoid facing the truth.
So tell me, how does that put a dock under water? How does it require raising the whole sewer system to keep it working? How does it just happen to synchronize with the tide?
I can see it occasionally reversing the storm drains, of course, but some areas now have floods happen on a sunny day. It just comes up out of the ground.
Now pull your head out of your ass, the gas is making you woozy.
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?!
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.
Lets Hypothetically ?
https://news.google.com/newspa...
That would be like the "Hypothetically " ice free north pole by 2000 ?
Or would that be the same way the UN spoke of "Hypothetical" climate refugees
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
It's a result of billions of humans living on the planet and their activities and industry. Short of ridding the world of the majority of those people global warming will continue to climb
Real shame people don't take genocide well.
Lets Hypothetically ?
https://news.google.com/newspa...
That would be like the "Hypothetically " ice free north pole by 2000 ?
Actually, the full quote is "...and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean..." (emphasis mine). The source of the claim, Berndt Balchen certainly had an interesting biography, but neither was he trained as a scientist, nor what the statement in a scientific publication.
Stephan
15 years after the prediction date the Arctic is still covered in ice and the and the Antarctic ice is expanding.
And your point is? Because one non-scientist made an ambiguous claim about a possible outcome, all scientific claims are invalid? We've started commercial shipping through the Arctic, and "Antarctic ice" is shrinking, what is growing slightly is maximum Antarctic sea ice extend.
Stephan