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Climate Change Could Cross Key Threshold in a Decade, Scientists Say (reuters.com)
The planet could pass a key target on world temperature rise in about a decade, prompting accelerating loss of glaciers, steep declines in water availability, worsening land conflicts and deepening poverty, scientists said this week. But the planet is already two-thirds of the way to that lower and safer goal, and could begin to pass it in about a decade, according to Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre. Reuters reports: With world emissions unlikely to slow quickly enough to hit that target, it will probably be necessary to remove some carbon pollution from the atmosphere to stabilize the planet, scientists said. That could happen by planting forests or by capturing and then pumping underground emissions from power plants. But other changes -- such as reducing food waste and creating more sustainable diets, with less beef and fewer imported greenhouse vegetables -- could also play a big role in meeting the goal, without so many risks, he said.
And the decade before that too, come to think of it.
...in 2006 by Al Gore? "...unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return", Gore said.
...in 1999, by James Hansen, telling us that the 2000's would rival the 1930's for the highest ever... of course, then we went into a "hiatus" of global warming. Original article.
...in 2006, by this group, saying, Extinction is OUR choice, unless... .... within the next 8 years we have STOPPED using fossil fuels, PLANTED millions of trees, ended logging, and PREPARED our cities and agriculture for the inevitable sea rise. OTHERWISE OUR CHILDREN MAY NOT SURVIVE!
...in 2006, by the Independent?
...in late 2006, by Mother Jones?
..in 2004, by James Hansen? Article
Or maybe just google all this from 10+ years ago, telling us we'd all be dead in 10 years. google.com
Let's stop with the hysteria and stick to facts. I'm not against cutting CO2 emissions, I am against needless panic mongering.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
This would be very valid criticism of a theoretical climate model that would predict that it would get there and stay there. Instead, all recognized models suggest that we get there quickly and keep going.
A car analogy. You see a sign "end of the road, cliff drop ahead". You step on the accelerator and say to your passengers "No worries, I walked past this sign and there is no cliff there right away". Do you have enough time to brake? Who knows, but I'd want you to pull over so I could get out right away. Unfortunately, we are all in the same car.
and stop telling us that while every cold year did not refute anything, the hot ones are, in fact, confirming.
No single year that's colder than average in one particular place is significant, nor one that's hotter than average in one particular place. The important feature about global warming (or, if you prefer, global climate change) is the global part.
A year that's warmer than average averaged across the whole Earth is indicative... but not conclusive.
A whole sequence of years that are all unusually warm, averaged across the whole Earth, however: that is significant.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You're missing a main point - we can't magically undo 150 years of CO2 creation when we decide the effects are noticeable. There will be a time when actions are taken to reduce the effects, but that won't stop the effects from increasing for the foreseeable future. Will it cause our extinction? Doubtful. Will it cause extinctions and much harm? It's already happening. Even with the asteroid 65M years ago, it wasn't a dino free world the next day. The extinctions took several 1000s of years, IIRC, and then another 1.5 million or so before the biosphere started seriously diversifying again. So, to put that in perspective, recorded history only barely covers 5000 years.
If scientists came and told the average couch potato that unless they stopped driving their gas-guzzler today, their great great great grandchildren might be living in an arid desert barely scratching out a living and dying of thirst, I'm sure exactly 0% would stop driving their gas guzzlers. The average couch potato can barely conceive of issues next week, much less several generations away. Look what it took to get chloro-flouro-carbons out of use.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This argument just needs to die. It's not going to happen unless we're talking about some sci-fi book/movie. China does this, but they are a communist country too, so their people gave up their choice in any matter what so ever just simply by being born in the country.
To the contrary. You do not need to "give up choice" to limit population. Demographic studies have demonstrated that there are three things that have been shown to reduce population growth.
1. Prosperity. Demographics shows that affluent people, on the whole, have fewer children than poor people. You want to reduce population growth in poor countries? Address the poverty.
2. Education. Demographics shows that educating people reduces the birth rate. Most effectively, educating girls (who in many countries with high population growth have no access to education at all)-- but in general: population growth rate decreases with education.
3. Access to birth control techniques. This actually surprised the demographers, who hadn't predicted it, but the data is pretty firm. Independent of the first two factors, simply give people access to means of control over their own reproduction... and they, in general, have fewer children.
So, that's it: how to save the world: bring people out of poverty, give them education, and give them access to birth control.
You don't need the totalitarian bullshit.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
*sigh* There are no serious AGW primary forcing computer models that wouldn't have us hitting his special target temperature even if we had cut all emissions in 1985. CO2, methane, everything. Which means disingenuous shitbirds like you have exactly four choices. Either seriously advocate the eradication of between 50-95% of the human race as well as an accompanying drop in living standard depending on just how much of humanity you want to keep around, advocate for chemically geoengineering the Earths atmosphere to drop temps, advocate creating a giant solar shield, or accelerate development through incentives for absorbing and sequestering CO2 into various long term storage mediums. Pussyfooting around like a bitch saying that any sort of Kyoto Accords will do jack fucking shit to seriously mitigate AGW temp rise is, while amusing, utterly pathetic.
What most people don't get is that CO2 takes about 100 years to cycle out of the atmosphere. And about 20 years to impact the cycles.
The climate change you see today is from what we did from 1900 to 1990. It's already baked in. The changes we do today affect 2035 to 2135.
However, planting trees or algae farms which we then store and don't use has an impact immeadiately.
Seaweed is actually a great carbon store.
In terms of immeadiate impacts, the best you can do is:
1. stop eating beef, unless it's free range beefalo or beef in non-pastoral settings (yes, cow farts do impact the climate, but it's what they eat especially that matters). Side effect: healthier for you in terms of heart risk and diet, bonus points.
2. stop flying on old inefficient airplanes except for turboprops. Use high speed rail where it exists, or boats.
3. replace all your old inefficient money wasting appliances with new high efficient energy star appliances. As a personal example, I cut my utility bill in HALF by doing this, and the new stuff is WAY QUIETER and uses less hot water. And my clothes wear out half as fast. massive cost savings here. Fridge, washer, dryer.
4. get a hybrid or plug in car or truck. In Canada they have 2017 model plug in trucks. Same goes for business. Saves TONS OF DOLLARS on fuel and maintenance. Plus, if you buy high end cars, the added electric power makes your car a speed demon! Ultra fast!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
New York City was supposed to be under water by now. Same people are saying the same thing. Time appears to be very subjective to these people. Any prediction or statement involving time should be taken lightly.
We've already crossed past arbitrary points of no return and whenever it happens... goal post is moved.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/20...
We're constantly being treated to this and when the prediction doesn't happen... no apology... no admission... nothing. Just a goal post move.
Will they admit in 50 years what they haven't admitted over 20? Will they admit over 100 what they won't over 50?
I suspect that only death by old age is going to resolve this because some people are going to keep this shit up to their graves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
The Jurassic period was really quite long, and long ago. Long enough for solar evolution to be significant. At the beginning of the Jurassic, the sun was about 2% fainter than now, at the end about 1.5% fainter. That is about 26W/sqm on the solar constant, or about 4.6 W/sqm of radiative forcing if corrected for albedo and averaged over the whole surface of the Earth. 5 times modern CO2 is about a radiative forcing of ln(5)*5.35, or 8.6W/sqm. So just the change in the sun cuts the effect into half, leaving 4W/sqm, which our current climate models translate into 3.2K of temperature difference. So even without taking other effects (minor orbital variations, configuration of the continents) into account, your claim agrees quite nicely with our current theoretical results. Of course, the sun is unlikely to get significantly fainter or stronger over the the next few thousand years, so there will be no free lunch from that angle. If we go back up to 5 times current CO2, we can expect about 7K of temperature increase.
And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2!
Since our increase of CO2 produced by burning fossil carbon with atmospheric oxygen, at best we'll get back the O2 we sucked from the atmosphere. Not that a significant quick increase would be advantageous - it would play havoc with the biosphere and massively increase the risk of and by fires.
Stephan
I'm sure if climate scientists were in charge of things they would "put up". But they're not; politicians are, and politicians naturally worry more about being b lamed for action more than being blamed for inacdtion. They'd rather be forced to spend a trillion dollars than choose to spend a hundred billion.
But even if you are willing to take the hit as a politician, you can't do it alone. You need to bring other politicians around, and the public around as well. If you can't take effective steps right away, you take what you can. This gets people working on CO2 reduction technologies and businesses, and builds a constituency for more steps. It's like stopping a cattle stampede. You can't make the entire herd stop and change direction at once, you get the lead cows heading in a slightly different direction.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
China? The country with CO2 emissions of 7.6t/capita in 2014, the country which threw major breaks on CO2 emissions compared to any pre 2012 period? The country which is happily building nuclear power, reducing coal import, and which has less than half the emissions per capita of USA? Is that the China you're talking about?
India? They're ranked 43rd in CO2 emissions per capita. It's nice of you to blame them for all of the world's problems (the USA is number 6 by the way, immediately behind the dirty shits that generate power just by pumping crude oil into furnaces and belching black smog in the air in the process. Congratulations!) Their rise has been tiny and gentle in comparison to the USA's
I'm a bit more curious though about Russia, a country who's emission have reduced since 1990 by a larger factor than that of the USA.
And Brazil... a country with 1/10th of the total emissions of the USA despite having 2/3rds of the people, who account less than 1% of CO2, and who's CO2 emissions also haven't increased by any appreciable amount in the past 5 years.
Yes clearly all the countries you listed are the problem. Not the well established western countries which happily spew a shitton of CO2 into the air and continue to do so. It must be all those developing countries who somehow are demonstrating that they can develop without the meteoric rise in emissions of the USA and Europe. /slow clap.