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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.
No, the new title will be: Make America Sweat Again
Nullius in verba
The globe gets warmer and cooler and has since it formed, life goes on.
So prove that the current warming is natural. You've made a statement that can be proven, but it never is. You can't just say the earth has been warmer therefore it's natural. That's like if my car breaks down with smoke pouring from under the hood I think it's just out of gas, because it's happened before. I could check gauges and see, but I'm relying not on current data but instead an historical anecdote. Really, the only evidence you have is that the earth was warmer at periods before. Yeah, no shit, no scientist has ever said it wasn't. What the research shows is that this warming is unprecedented in the earth's history. So your statement is nothing but an unproven guess with no evidence of support. What natural processes are at work here that do account for the warming?
Because the earth has been hotter than now prior to the industrial age.
QED
Every time I see this, I want to reply, "And during the Hadean, it was hot enough that most of the Earth's surface was molten lava..."
This time, I did.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I hate to break this to you, bro, but actual scientists are also a little bit ashamed when you call yourself a "scientist" with your associate's degree in CS from DeVry.
You could take everything "average people" know and understand about science and fit it in a Fox & Friends chyron. Don't believe me? When you're on the bus going to the call center tomorrow morning, ask them the difference between "average" and "mean" and see what the average answers are. If we're going to start using "average people's" knowing and understanding as any kind of metric in science, we might as well just give up as a species and elect a reality TV host as president.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well yes, during epochs like when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But the issue here isn't that the Earth has been hotter, the issue is that it has never been so hot and supported human civilization. You understand the patterns of where civilizations have developed over the last 10,000 is intrinsically tied to post-glacial climate, and now that we're seriously fucking that up, there are going to be significant impacts on the descendants of those civilizations. In other words, pretty much everyone alive today, and over the next century.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Absent proof of man's forcing of warming - we're left with only one conclusion: it's natural.
Nonsense. Lack of proof for X does not mean "not X" must be true. It just means that X is unproven.
Also, outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as "proof". Just evidence.
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.
Anyway, people need to get a grip on this subject and meet in the middle...
Silly attempts to look "fair & balanced" on the climate is a big part of the problem--as soon as you start doing that, you've caved to the anti-science crowd who think that, if they tell themselves enough fairy tales, they'll become true.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.
This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.
Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.
There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.
No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in.
If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.
You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?
So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I was on a sinking ship. We had two holes. Some people said it was punishment from God and we should die. Others said it was because the ship hit some rocks.
Now I am not a rabid religious (not that they are all like that), I think there's a lot to both sides of the equation, here.
[snip a lot that could be compared]
Anyway, people need to get a grip on this subject and meet in the middle. So we should just leave one hole open and close the other one.
So let's stop the hyperbole and have some reasonable discourse about how to deal with it instead of pointing fingers and name calling.
That way we will all be happy.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Anyway, people need to get a grip on this subject and meet in the middle...
Silly attempts to look "fair & balanced" on the climate is a big part of the problem--as soon as you start doing that, you've caved to the anti-science crowd who think that, if they tell themselves enough fairy tales, they'll become true.
For a practical example, let's meet in the middle with the Flat Earth crowd, and agree that the Earth is a very oblate spheroid.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Humans aren't the only, or most important things, on the planet. We're fucking up ecosystems that have taken millions of years to stabilize and balance, and cannot react fast enough to survive the rapid changes we are causing.
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.
What about the Medieval Warm Period? /. myth.
Which of them? There where three.
It was global, and it was warmer than today.
How global they were is still depabet. None of them was warmer thn today. That is a
What caused the warming from 1910 to 1940
I'm mot aware about a particular warming, besides the warming caused by CO2 during that period. Compared to today it was actually relatively cold, at least in winters.
What caused the global cooling from 1945 to 1975?
The sulfur emmissions from coal power plants. Don't you learn anything in school at your place?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
All real slashdot readers browse at -1 so as to avoid the political bullshit that has taken over the moderation system.
Hmm... I'd call myself a real Slashdot reader. Until recently I've always browsed exclusively at -1, and I often upmodded -1 posts even when I disagreed with them, because I felt that they contributed something to the discussion. But just within the last few days I stopped doing so, because now the overwhelming majority of -1 comments are racist, or sexist, or childish name calling, or Trump non-sequiturs, or other toxic crap that have made this place like a birdcage in which the newspaper never gets replaced. I totally get your desire to "avoid the political bullshit" - but for me, satisfying that desire currently requires that I don't browse at -1.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
What I don't understand overall is that warming isn't necessarily bad. Higher temps and higher CO2 levels? Better food production.
If you would have said warming isn't necessarily *all* bad, you'd be a lot more accurate. There will be some benefits, for sure. But overall the bad is expected to outweigh the good. It's easier to measure the impact in terms of costs, rather than "cans" and "can'ts". Because yes, of course we *can* survive it all and do all sorts of technological wonders combating the negative effects, but what is it going to cost? We're going to having rebuild/retrofit/move our coastal areas which encompass many major cities. We're going to have to shift our agricultural production regions, not just crops but livestock too. "Hot spots" might become quite inhospitable where susceptible people may not leave the house for more than a few hours (infants/elderly) or impede outdoor day jobs for everyone else. Then the oceans, oh the oceans. Don't know where to start on that one, let's just leave it at wild seafood may become a delicacy.
I'm going to throw a dart and say we're talking about not 10's but 100's of trillions of pure USD. Not counting the impact in human costs. That's the problem.
What I don't understand overall is that warming isn't necessarily bad. Higher temps and higher CO2 levels? Better food production.
Better food production in limited areas. However, the land will be devastated in many regions that are currently relied upon. More volatile weather will result in extreme drought followed by extreme rainfalls. Some plants will do well but many will not.
So what is the real effect of this? Mass extinctions of wildlife both on land and the ocean. Untold millions will perish from die from famine while others will migrated. It won't always be migrating for refuge either, wars will be fought over land for food production.
But hey, if you like mass extinctions, mass migration, war, genocide and famine, the future is looking rosy.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How a generally pro-science forum like slashdot can have a good chunk of its posters revert to fox news talking points on politically charged issues.
The same, tired, debunked, denier arguments again and again..
Translation: I have no real clue how either climatology or economics work, but if I use the words "problem", "mathematical" and "model" enough times, somehow that wins the argument for me.
The real problem here, sir, is you don't have the vaguest idea what the fuck you're talking about. If you have some alternative explanation as to where the energy increased CO2 concentrations will inevitably trap in the lower atmosphere are going, then by all means provide it. But this rambling word salad only demonstrates your ignorance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.