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Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Humans Are the Cause (npr.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers. The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization." The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming. The findings contradict statements by President Trump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate. The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, "will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally." Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit relative to pre-industrial times. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.

12 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's an interesting statement to make now by Pikoro · · Score: 5, Informative

    Want to see something cool?

    Even with your cherry picked data, guess what?

    http://init.sh/wp-content/uplo...

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
  2. Re:It's ok... by countach · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, tons of people are building coal plants. The Chinese are planning 700 more coal plants:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

  3. Re: Got lucky! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You mean, they'll be from China? Did you even bother to read what I even wrote? You realize the USA has some of the most aggressive environmental protection than all of the world, right?

  4. Re: Got lucky! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    You realize the USA has some of the most aggressive environmental protection than all of the world, right?

    Do you realize that Americans emit twice as much CO2 per capita as China, and eight times as much as India? Expecting them to make equal cuts is ridiculous. The cuts need to be where the waste is.

    List of countries by per capita CO2 emissions

  5. Re: More bullshit. Right on time. As expected. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    As Einstein said, everything is relative...

    Einstein never said that. He said that inertial motion is relative. Rotational motion is not inertial, and is not relative. Objects move linearly relative to other objects. But objects rotate in an absolute sense.

    If you are locked in a black box, there is no way to determine if you have constant linear velocity. There is also no way to distinguish between gravity and acceleration. But you can detect rotation by using a Foucault pendulum or other scientific instruments.

  6. Re: Got lucky! by crypticedge · · Score: 4, Informative

    China's emissions per year has been falling, and they canceled all new coal power plants 2 years ago.

  7. Re:100 reasons why climate change is not man-made by crypticedge · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was also debunked, 3/4ths of that paste is drivel that has no basis in facts, and the last 1/4th require you to have quit studying science after learning step 3 of the scientific method.

  8. Re:It's ok... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Reports of China's coal-fetish are greatly overstated.

    https://www.americanprogress.o...

    TL;DR version is that a lot of those plants won't get built or will be white elephants. China is aiming for 1000GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030 as part of its Paris agreement, although so far they are exceeding that by a wide margin.

    Same with their nuclear programme. Basically everything that wasn't already being built has been cancelled. As their battery production ramps up basically everything other than renewables is looking shakey, with profitability looking increasingly unlikely.

    And even the coal plants they are building are better than the US ones, because they have stricter emissions standards for them.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  9. Re:That's an interesting statement to make now by butzwonker · · Score: 4, Informative

    The American public is strongly influenced by lobbyists without being aware of it.

    On a conference we've hosted in July, I've seen research on the disinformation infrastructure of the US oil companies. The researchers used web scraping and data mining software (basically the same as what intelligence agencies would do, just on a smaller scale) to trace the funding and organization of the networks of the petrochemical industry in the US. The graph of their network is huge. There are more than a hundred different lobby organizations, including fake research institutes, strongly biased "think tanks", and various P&R institutions cleverly disguised as interest groups that are all directly sponsored by millions if not billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry. It's a complicated network, but all of these organization have as their main purpose to further the interests of their sponsors. But some of them are very sneaky about it, you wouldn't realize their real agenda by looking at their web page.

    The US chemical and petrochemical industry and corresponding political groups spends a lot of money on this in the US. It's no wonder that the perception of ecological topics is so different in the US from the rest of the world. I believe that they spend way less in Europe and other regions but have to admit that I haven't been able to check that - the research I've seen was only about the US.

  10. Re: Got lucky! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    GP's post is slightly inaccurate in that China haven't cancelled all of their plants, but they have massively scaled back. In the meantime Trump has pulled us Out of the Paris Accord and is actively planning To ramp up coal use.

    Tell me again which country is the bad actor?

  11. Links to sources by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you don't like NPR, here are some other sources:

    https://phys.org/news/2017-11-climate-real.html

    http://blog.ucsusa.org/rachel-licker/what-is-the-national-climate-assessment-the-most-comprehensive-report-on-climate-change-in-the-u-s

    http://www.themorningsun.com/article/MS/20170822/LOCAL1/170829886

    And links to the actual document:

    PDF file draft as of June 2017: https://assets.documentcloud.o...

    New York Times link to the draft report: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

    National Academy of Sciences Review of the Draft report: https://nas-sites.org/americas...

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  12. Re:Just wait by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Informative

    You cite a group that puts out false propaganda to support a conservative agenda to claim one desert might be shrinking.

    Meanwhile, California has just put out fires fueled by climate change. Other deserts are definitely expanding. China isn't investing in green energy because they're tree-huggers. They're investing because their ruling elites are smart enough to realize climate change is real, is an existential threat, and that green energy is the new oil rush.

    Probably not surprising given that their leaders are largely people with science degrees and the Chinese communist party is better educated than the american voting population.