Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Federal Climate Report Finds Link Between Climate Change, Human Activity (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans," a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. "Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change," they wrote. The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it. "The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today," reports The New York Times. "The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius." Given the Trump administration's stance on climate change, some of the scientists who worked on the report are concerned that the report will be suppressed.
The press keeps calling it "leaked," but it's been freely available for months, if you were paying attention.
They're still working on it, which is why it hasn't been released.
You're either a liar or an fucking moron . CO2's absorption properties and the consequences of increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been known for over a century. And your "20 year claim" is nothing more than cherry picked nonsense that is, on the face of it false. So I'm leaning towards lying troll, but low IQ moron is also possible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In some areas better food production, in other ways much worse. While in the medium term you could see more precipitation in the American Midwest, in the long term it will mean higher precipitation in winter and much less in summer, with much higher temperatures. In other words, one of North America's major bread baskets will become less conducive to agriculture. So yes, while they may be growing wheat in the Northwest Territories, for the US it could, in a hundred years mean less food security and more reliance on imports. Rinse and repeat for several grain-growing regions around the world. And understand that the patterns of civilization are still largely based on climactic conditions that came into place at the end of the last glacial period, so we're talking about billions of people living in regions that may, in a century, be far less capable of sustaining those populations.
Oh, and let's talk about the collapse of fisheries because the other really bad side effect of higher concentrations of CO2 is significant alterations of pH levels in the oceans, meaning more dead zones and large algal blooms which are going to choke out a lot of ocean life.
I'd say we can't really handle getting warmer any better than we can handle getting colder. In either case, there are a whole lot of people who are going to find food costs rising, and while the developed world may be able to absorb those higher costs, more marginal populations may have a harder time. The other thing to factor in is that people just don't sit on their chunk of land now being turned into an inhospitable desert where they can't grow crops or raise livestock, or where rising sea levels and more powerful storm systems wipe out their crops. They get up and move, so you'll see more large scale migrations, so if you think Syria's disintegration is bad, wait fifty years.
Trying to extol some modest benefits to climate change without mentioning the significant economic and social costs seems at best naive, and at worst disingenuous to me.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Pretty simple - there WASN'T a "pause" from 1998 to 2015. 1998 was well above the trend - an outlier, with both 1997 and 1999 significantly lower. 2015 was the first year that was higher than 1998, but the preceding and following years were not much lower - so the 3 year (or 5 year, or 10 year) average for the late 90s was significantly lower than the average for the last few years.
So at best you could say "There was a huge drop from 1998 to 1999, then steady warming, temperatures have been rising since 1999." Which sounds pretty odd, but is much more accurate than any so-called "pause".
If you are on this page, you probably understand something about signal processing and statistics -ask yourself why people have been saying there was a "pause" when the data - whether statistically analysed or just plain eyeballed - shows no such thing.
The New York Times has added a correction to their article. At the end of the article, a paragraph now states
Correction: August 9, 2017
An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report. While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.