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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.
@jnaujok - look at the years. They are all election years. This isn't about physical/environmental science, it is about the science of social engineering aka votes.
Look, the "point of no return" is completely arbitrary - how much CO2 do you want in the atmosphere? However much we put in there, it will remain for 10's of thousands of years. Today is a point of no return. So is tomorrow. So is the day after, and so on. The only thing that's been changing is how much CO2 is up there and will remain up there. In other words, this isn't evidence against the greenhouse effect (which is well-understood, tested, and resoundingly supported by the vast majority of scientists in the field). This is evidence that humans tend to move goalposts when they blow past a deadline. There is right now little doubt that the Earth's environment has been altered and will continue to be altered by the elevated CO2. People will die, cities will flood, animals will go extinct. This will all almost certainly happen, the only thing that remains to be seen is the extent to which we increase CO2 levels before switching to renewable energy sources and the extent to which our environment changes as a result of the greenhouse effect. Make no mistake, we have long-since crossed the line of no return and are moving further into dangerous territory with each passing day.
Every year is an election year. It's just a matter of how big the election is.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The above is a 100% accurate statement. The below statement is also 100% accurate:
"The planet could pass a key target on world temperature drops in about a decade, prompting massive increases in wealth for everyone, plenty of food and peace for all mankind."
or even:
"The planet could pass a key target on world temperature rise in about a decade, prompting massive increases in wealth for everyone, plenty of food and peace for all mankind."
In other words, neither statement says anything but that a possibility, no matter how likely or unlikely exists. Which make them meaningless in terms of a scientific conclusion.
Wake me up again when scientists say, "If we don't drop our carbon consumption tomorrow, we're all going to die. Therefore, wanting to live, as of today I'm no longer going to consume any more carbon than I absolutely need to live" and have actual data to back it up. 'Cause that's about how drastic it'd have to be for people to believe after all the false alarms and cries of wolf not matched by personal action nor actual empirical results. After you're wrong repeatedly in your models, the rest of us will need to see some actually predict something accurately for a while before thinking you're on to something.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
There's more. In 1989, we only had ten years to fix the problem.
There are some people who are climate deniers, who say that humans can't affect the climate. Those people are fools.
There are other people who refuse to believe that there is plenty of propaganda going on. Those people are also fools.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The "hiatus" in global warming was produced by choosing 1998 as the baseline year. Why was 1998 a good year to use as a baseline? Because it was, by far, the hottest year on record when it happened, shattering the previous record (1997) by 0.13C.
Now this is a news for nerds site, so I don't have to explain why cherrypicking an outlier as your baseline is dishonest. People who swallowed that are either dishonest or mathematical ignoramuses.
I will go out on a limb right now and say that since El Niño has passed an next year will be less warm, sometime around 2020 we'll be hearing "No significant warming since 2016."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
IAACS (I am a climate scientist), and the actions we take NOW do, and will, matter for the future to come. From a science perspective, cutting emissions can have a significant impact on the global temperature anomaly. There is the hope that by meeting these international agreements, we can collectively stop the temperature rise before more dire positive feedback mechanisms begin to occur.
The most obvious example of a positive feedback mechanism would be "Snowball Earth", where-in the albedo of the planet is increased due to ice coverage. A higher albedo means more reflected radiation from the sun, cooling the planet, which encourages the growth of ice....etc etc. The opposite feedback is true right now of Arctic ice. Less ice = more sunlight = less ice, etc etc.
There are hundreds of these mechanisms at play in the climate, and we haven't discovered all of them. Of the ones we have discovered, there are some Very Unfortunate Mechanisms that activate right around 2 degrees Celcius. Unfortunate in the sense of negative impact on humanity. When I sit in on science talks, and read scientific articles, and chat with fellow scientists, they are very aware of the difficulty of change for a global economy. The optimistic view is that we can meet a 1 or 1.5 degree celcius change with significant cooperation among governments, corporations, and people. No one is advocating for eradicating populations, and not many are in favor of geoengineering.
So to respond to your assertion, yes, there are AGW primary forcing computer models that predict us mitigating climate change. In fact, the average of all the serious computer models agrees that mitigation can work.
Finally, one of the primary problems in global change is the lack of individuals and groups willing to take responsibility. Your attitude of "it's already over don't bother" is what we have to fight. It's not over, and it won't be for some 200 years.
Meanwhile
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
11 years without a major hurricane strike. I was pretty sure the east coast and at least NYC were supposed to be under water by now
http://www.salon.com/2001/10/2...
Oops
Under the right conditions, a "major hurricane" isn't required. Have we already forgotten Hurricane Sandy, the disaster which led a respected Republican to embrace a Kenyan?
http://www.thegatewaypundit.co...
Hurricane strikes are largely luck or the lack of it.
Also, try not to be US-centric - it's called GLOBAL warming; there has been some impressive typhoons in the past few years, including one that was 1/2 the size of India - or 2.5 times the size of Texas. That was Haiyan aka Super Typhoon Yolanda which killed 10,000 Filipinos.
There's also some dispute as to whether or not we'll see more superstorms as wind shear may be exacerbated by a warming world and that should reduce the number of hurricanes.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
no, peer reviewed scientific journals on ScienceDirect. Most alumni of research colleges and universities can access that, and a larger quantity of such research is available to the general public if it's federally funded in part. You can usually read the published articles, whereas research students staff and faculty can read the not yet published research.
Adapt. The future owes you nothing. Science has no agenda.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Uhm, it floods on Indian Creek around 30th street with just high tide, not even when raining.