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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.
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.
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-...
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
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!
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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.
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.
"the costs are too high"
The costs are always too high.
Same excuse was used against smokestack scrubbers, pollution cleanup, healthcare, social security, you name it.
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.
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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
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.