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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.
It's a shame that clean and cheap nuclear fusion is always 20 years away. At least the AI singularity is always 50 years away though.
Define "this". What was supposed to happen in January 2016? Some key metrics already happened. 2015 was the hottest year on record. Some other key metrics will also happen in the next 10 years.
Only idiots think that make climate change a hoax.
...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.
You mean like forcing families in China to have only one child? I wonder why nobody ever thought about it...
@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.
And I dont remember where, that any prediction that gives a sufficiently large amount of time before it is to be affirmed (5 years?) will be forgotten by enough people or vague enough in anyone's memory that it doesn't have to be based on facts at all.
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.
There is not "hiatus." Get your head out of your ass. http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-...
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
It really doesn't matter if this is true or not. Either way, it won't be fixed in time. The bottom line reality is that Russia, China, Brazil and India simply don't care. China does care a little but only a little. None of them are going to reduce emissions if it harms economic growth. They've all been clear that they think it's unfair that the more developed countries who got there faster got to pollute all they wanted to with no consequence in the past. So everybody should really hope that the climate change folks are mistaken because this is simply not solvable with those 4 at a minimum being unwilling to do anything about it.
*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.
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.
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! --
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.
It's not that animals and plants can't live in warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels. They clearly can.
The problem is, animals and plants are adapted to the current climate. A sudden shift will cause many species to go extinct. It takes many millions of years to build back biodiversity. Humans will probably be extinct before biodiversity returns to pre-industrial levels.
Also, parts of the world that are currently arable will become barren; and some parts that are currently barren will become arable. There could potentially be food shortages and distribution problems until we adapt. Certainly, we can and shall adapt, but how many people will suffer in the interim.
We can relocate people from islands and coastal areas, but at what cost? Monetary costs? Emotional costs? cultural costs?
Storms and extreme weather events will become more frequent. Not ideal for civilization, people will die. We will adapt, but again at what cost. So yes, there may have been more biodiversity during the Jurassic (I haven't checked to compare), but I assure you, there won't be more biodiversity any time soon. Many species will die before new ones are born.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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."
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.
New Scientist, Oct. 8 - 14, had a great article on cracking natural gas into hydrogen gas and carbon black. Researchers in Spain bubbled natural gas through a column of molten tin at about 1000C. Hydrogen came off the top while carbon black floated to the surface of the tin. Had a reaction efficiency of about 80%. Would be best to use the hydrogen in a hybrid vehicle - batteries would be charged by a combined cycle "engine". This engine would be a solid oxide fuel cell followed by a supercritical CO2 turbine. Could get power efficiencies in the range of 70%. This would give excellent fuel mileage from a cheap fuel. Disposing of the carbon black would be a problem, but this a minor irritant compared to emitting carbon dioxide. The exhaust from the engine would be water vapor only. A crash program probably could get us converted to this tech in 10 to 15 years. Then, the fear of climate change would become just a memory. But, considering how disfunctional our governmental institutions are, transitioning to this clean technology has a snowball's chance in hell of happening. We're doomed.
Of course, the problem with focusing exclusively on the costs of trying to stop or (more realistically) slow climate change implicitly assumes that inaction won't cost us anything. In fact we're looking at costs either way. We're in a minimax kind of situation: how do we minimize the maximum costs?
There's also another wrinkle to this, which is that costs (and indeed profits -- every misfortune profits someone) aren't distributed evenly. The key determinant of how much you have to pay for or profit from climate change is how mobile your capital is. If you're a Bengladeshi subsistence farmer you're going to take +2C right on the chin. If you're a Wall Street bank you take your investments out of farms which are going to lose productivity in the next ten years or so shift to underwriting the opening of new farms in newly favorable places. In other words you make money going and coming. Likewise if you own multiple homes your risk from local changes is spread out. If the lion's share of your nest egg is in a house that is in the new 20 year floodplain or in the range of a newly endemic zoonosis, you're screwed.
So even if you can't avoid +2C without climate engineering (which might not be such a bad thing), getting there in ten years instead of twenty or thirty makes a huge difference. And beyond 2C, there are other benchmarks beyond that we don't want to hit in a hurry.
This is not a black-and-white situation: that we had our chance to do something and now there is nothing we can do. We had our chance to avoid this situation and now we're talking about how much time we'll have to adapt.
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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.
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I'm willing to start with them. Yes the world is getting hotter. Yes man is contributing and most likely is the driving force behind it. No there's no stopping it without unbelievably drastic measures that will not be accepted by almost anybody. The best chance for stopping it is a world war...
Why do we have to stop it, isn't adapting easier? We can grow food in the desert now, there is no real need to panic.
From 1997 to 1998 there is no warming..
Year to year warming is dominated by statistical noise, which is what I suspect you are trying to say when you say that there was no warming between 1997 and 1998; however for what it is worth 1998 was significantly warmer than 1997, so by your definition there is "warming".
The 'warming' in 2016 is insignificant. It is as straight of a horizontal line between the two points as you can make on a graph
If you choose two points you will always get a straight line. If the end point is 2016 and the start point is any prior year in the instrumental record, the slope will be upward.
If the temperature doesn't reach 1998 or 2016 levels until the next El Nino, then there will still have been no warming.
This is what logicians call "equivocation", which is making up your own definition of a term to make your argument true. What most people understand "global warming" to be is an underlying upward trend in temperature created by increases in greenhouse gases. This is overlaid on both year-to-year variability and of course ENSO. Comparing an El Niño year to a La Niña or non-ENSO year is an apples-to-oranges comparison. If you want to compare individual years to determine whether there's an underlying warming trend, then you need to compare El Niño years to prior El Niño years, etc. Or you an take a moving average with a window that's large enough to average out any ENSO events.
If you take a ten year moving average, in the last 40 years that ten year average has dropped three times: in 1975, 1993, and 2008; remained the same as the prior year once: in 2000; and has increased 36 times. If there were no underlying warming trend then the ten year moving average would be equally likely to go up or down in successive years; in fact it's ten times more likely to go up than down. 2008 by the way was an anomaly in not only was it an unusually strong La Niña, it was a rare ten year period with *four* La Niña years in it. If you take a twenty year moving average the last time that average went down was 1965.
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