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Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Worldwide emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide have flattened out in the past three years, a new study showed Monday, raising hopes that the world is nearing a turning point in the fight against climate change. However, the authors of the study cautioned it's unclear whether the slowdown in CO2 emissions, mainly caused by declining coal use in China, is a permanent trend or a temporary blip...
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
That the rate increase is going down isn't good enough, alas. That means it's still increasing. We need a reversal, with less CO2 pumped out than what is absorbed, and we're nowhere near that yet.
Still, it's a good first sign, but we're still getting worse, not better.
A big factor is of course the cost of solar and wind, which are now already cheaper than coal and oil, even without subsidies.
http://www.climatecentral.org/... contains the graph
http://assets.climatecentral.o...
This shows the rise in the CO2 level in the atmosphere over the last 5 years.
For over a year now, it's been over 400ppm, and the rise in 2015-16, over the same period the year before has been the largest this past year than any time in the last five years.
So why did the UK & USA go to war in Iraq on the basis of chasing weapons of mass destruction that probably did not exist at a cost of some $1.1 trillion? Answer: because it suited other goals that politicians wanted. So: today politicians are chasing short term goals and keeping their eyes shut tight to the probable huge long term consequences of not dealing with climate change.
Seriously?
The problem exists.
The models aren't failing.
There is scientific consensus.
The "good news" here is that the problem isn't worsening as fast as it used to.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Last year broke the record with a growth rate over 3PPM / Year. Looking at this years monthly data, in 2016 we're on track to smash last year's record with somewhere around 3.5PPM / Year. Every year this decade has been at or above the average for previous decade. Rather than a levelling off, the data looks like continual growth.
Confused as to how any report can be claiming a "levelling off". Mauna Loa is seen as the de-facto standard for global CO2 levels as it's in the middle of the pacific and therefore isolated from localised effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory
Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years
I just heard that President Elect by popular vote, Donald Trump has pledged to fix this problem so you can all breathe easier now. The president is hard at work assembling a crack task force from among the ranks of Big Oil and Big Coal to bring CO2 emissions growth back on track.
CO2 does not cause warming. This has been shown to be a hoax.
If you want to be extremely pedantic, CO2 does not cause warming, the sun does. And no molecule that doesn't undergo a reaction (either chemical or physical) causes any warming. But that's pushing it a bit too much.
What a chemist will tell you is that CO2 or any molecule with three or more atoms has a scissoring motion that absorbs infrared wavelengths around the heat emissions that you can expect for a black body around the Earth's current temperature. So, rather than these emissions escaping towards outer space and having radiative cooling, you have them being partially absorbed by CO2 and other gases (water, methane, CFC gases and so on) and then emitted once again as the molecule relaxes to a more fundamental state. These emissions then happen in every direction, including back down to Earth, for a further chance at heating the planet. The important part here is the scissoring motion and the three atoms it needs. A diatomic molecule (oxygen, nitrogen, etc) will not cause this because the frequencies at which it absorbs energy are substantially different.
How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells.
Mission accomplished!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
They're not comparing the same thing (human emissions versus atmospheric levels).
No, its 'cuz if we were wrong about WMD in Iraq, it was likely that Saddam, who hated our guts over Gulf War 1, would have given said WMD to terrorists who would have deployed it on our densest population centers, the east coast and California. An anthrax attack could have possibly killed a million people. Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think? I live on the east coast, BTW, but have, or at least had immunity to anthrax due to having traveled to Iraq a couple times to assist the US Army. But it wouldn't be any fun to wake up one day and find that 90% of the people in my area dead due to such an attack.
Probably did not exist?
Oh except that we found stockpiles of said chemical weapons all over the country, troops were killed when they hit IED's made of chlorine rounds that we missed, and Syria who never had a known stockpile has been able to use Chemical weapons a few times, meaning the suspected export of unknown quantities of Chemical weapons during the run-up to the invasion occurred as feared.
The only thing we did not find was an active production system but they had six months to dismantle and hide or ship such to Syria.
Note that the (near) flat line is only for fossil-fuel derived CO2: not all human produced CO2, and certainly not all Earth produced !!
I would add that Gaddafi after seeing what happened in Iraqi decided to own up to a whole bunch of WMD that we basically didn't have a clue about and allowed them to be removed. It is highly unlikely this would have happened without the Iraqi invasion.
The problem with the invasion of Iraqi was not the invasion itself but the utter lack of post invasion planning by Bush and his fellow bunch of morons.
How much has Gore made so far?
"His name was James Damore."
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
Which is almost as dumb as knowing the rules of the American electoral process, which have been in place for literally centuries, and then complaining when they don't like the results.
Stop your FUD. It's ridiculous. Do you really think that Republicans want dirty water and pollution choked skies? Think about what you're saying. Opposition to the ham-handed EPA does not mean wanting to have toxic waste dumps leaching into ground water.
You're giving yourself heart palpitations for no reasons. There are other, well-founded reasons, to be opposed to Trump. This is f00king retarded.
#NeverTrump,
#NeverHillary.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
It's too early to celebrate because the data really doesn't show this purported downturn yet. Here's the measured carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the last five years:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...
And the full record:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...
If there's a recent downturn, I can't see it.
(A different link graphing the same data: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/progr... )
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
It's transparently stupid to declare anything as the obvious 'best' answer to Saddam era Iraq.
Saddam's attempted genocide of the Kurdish people in his Al-Anfal campaign through the use of chemical weapons, massacres of villages with conventional weapons, concentration camps for the captured, mass graves for the captured males old enough to bear arms, and systematic rape of the women. The rape wasn't about punishment or intimidation but an attempt to impregnate the victims with half-Arab children and effectively breed the Kurds out of existence. The campaign is documented extensively as any really good genocide needs to be administered well to make sure it's thorough. Unfortunately for Saddam, plane loads of said records were captured in the first gulf war.
Saddam left over a million dead in his war with Iran in which he again made absolutely extensive use of chemical and biological weapons.
Saddam again tried to conquer a neighbour, this time seizing all of Kuwait, effectively reducing the number of existing UN member nations by 1.
Saddam then waged another genocide, this time against Shia Iraqi's leaving hundreds of thousands dead.
Saddam no longer rules Iraq and is now dead. That's not nothing and to say it's transparently obvious an Iraq under his rule would be a better world today is an insult to his victims.
You can't say that because it's racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, evidence of white privilege, and means you hate puppies and want unicorns to die. You monster.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
Speaking as someone who was not only alive at the time but actively serving in the military at the time, you seem to forget Saddam himself was being conned by his own scientists who feared for their lives if they reported failure. Furthermore, the CIA believed they had WMD's, and the head of the CIA advised the Bush administration that WMD's were present.
So here you are, the President, sitting in the Oval Office. You've got a murderous thug of a dictator, someone who has shown no compunction about using WMD's against his own people when it suits him. His own services report having WMD's. Your own intelligence services confidently say he has WMD's. What do you do? Ignore all that?
Put this way, if you go to three different doctors and they all diagnose you with cancer, are you gonna say "nah, I feel fine, these guys don't know what they're talking about"? Or are you going to get treatment for cancer as if you actually HAVE cancer? And if afterwards when the chemo has made you sick as hell and all your hair falls out you discover you didn't really have cancer, are you going to blame yourself for making the decision to get treatment? Or are you going to blame those that wrongly advised you?
Based on your above comments, you'd have to blame yourself and hold those who wrongly diagnosed you as completely innocent. Not that that makes any fucking sense, but that's what you're doing.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Close to a quarter of a billion by 2013. Probably considerably more by now...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There was and wasn't weapons of mass destruction in the middle east. Depending on you view of what mass destruction is.
Well, the Israeli atomic bombs certainly should qualify.
3. The warming rate does not fit the null-hypothesis ("anthropogenic gasses have no effect on global climate.")
That is not actually the null hypothesis for the data currently being collected, since "greenhouse gas" and "anthropogenically sourced greenhouse gas" are not synonyms.
To rule out the null hypothesis, you actually have to test based on that null hypothesis. That means removing all other potential causes and varying only the parameter under study. If you want to disprove the null hypothesis as you have stated it, you need to have two systems: one with AGG and one without. The one without is the control. Where is the control Earth?
Without a control, you have correlation and not causation. Correlation is interesting. Causation is science. THAT'S how science works.
And science tells us that since warming has happened without humans being around (according to the proxies we have for temperature) we KNOW for a fact that there can be other causes. Without a control to rule them out, we have nothing but correlations.
The fact that you seem to be missing is that we have good measurements.
We have reasonable measurements of concentration of CO2 and temperature. Not "good" since the sampling is very very sparse compared to the volume of the planetary atmosphere and area of the surface. We don't have measurements of "anthropogenic gasses" since that would require a huge amount of instrumentation at the sources. Yes, we also can measure isotope ratios in the samples we do have, and from that try to back out the sources of the gasses, but that's limited in scope.
If you are proposing that some other input is accounting for the temperature increase, you need to identify that input .
"We can't think of any other cause, so it must be X." That's not how science works.
As for your other question, about paleoclimate
I'm sorry, but I didn't ask a question about paleoclimate. I made a statement of fact.
But just saying "the temperature has risen beforet" really isn't science.
It is part of the scientific process when you know for a fact that the cause you are attempting to pin the blame for a current event on did not exist when similar things happened in the past. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there can be other causes, the exclusion of which also requires a control Earth that isn't available.
tell me what you are hypothesizing is the input factor that made it rise in the past,
I'll tell you what. Read what I write and then stop at the end. Don't challenge me to provide answers for things I didn't say. That will save us all a lot of time.