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Global Warming Predictions May Now Be a Lot Less Uncertain (wired.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Humanity must not pass a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global temperature from pre-industrial levels, so says the Paris climate agreement. Cross that line and the global effects of climate change start looking less like a grave situation and more like a catastrophe. The frustrating bit about studying climate change is the inherent uncertainty of it all. Predicting where it's going is a matter of mashing up thousands of variables in massive, confounding systems. But today in the journal Nature, researchers claim they've reduced the uncertainty in a key metric of climate change by 60 percent, narrowing a range of potential warming from 3C to 1.2C. And that could have implications for how the international community arrives at climate goals like it did in Paris. The metric is called equilibrium climate sensitivity, but don't let the name scare you.
The "...don't let the name scare you" part sounds kinky. Wonder if "denialism" is its safe word?
Climate is not a static thing, it changes over time. We should not be wasting so much discussion and resources on something which is already known. If someone wants to live in an unchanging climate, go to a tropical island along the equator. Even then you still get wet and dry seasons. The world is heating up, we will survive. Some species will go extinct; they always do. Look at the dinosaurs or the megafauna of north America. This is not a major issue and we are going to spend trillions to fix a non-existant problem
I thought the entire point of Anthropomorphic Global Climate Change was to scare us? And that any attempt to minimize the fear was being a denier of settled science?
...is a religion, and msmash is auditioning to be a High Priestess.
Sir, that wasn't your daughter. It was a porn star that you paid to dress up like your daughter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it."
Pierre Gallois
That is why it is so critical to cherry pick data and not release raw data, because climate change deniers will just use the raw data to argue their point. We all know it is happening so we need to bolster our facts. The scientists have already voted so any facts that go against that need to be reexamined.
If someone wants to live in an unchanging climate, go to a tropical island along the equator.
The people of Dominica, Barbuda and Puerto Rico would like to have some words with you. Angry, 4-letter words about what you can do to yourself, and if you'd like to trade places with them, I'd bet.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The world is heating up, we will survive
Not without a lot of adjustments. Agriculture will have to change. Many places will become arid. Populations will move and of course there are people already where they want to move so expect lots and lots of wars.
Political systems and economic systems will be put under immense strains - even ditched.
So, yes, humanity will survive but not without some incredible changes.
Let's put it this way: the American way of life will disappear because it is unsustainable. The free market capitalism that many of us worship will be our end.
But that's in a couple of generations. None of us will be alive to see it. So, who cares about our grandchildren's generation, right?
Let see we have the really simple model. Add energy to a system at a constant rate, slow the rate at which energy leaves the system, the system heats up. Now smart people will make the system a lot more complicated and then add positive feed backs that slow the rate at which energy leaves the system and they will add estimates to when those positive feed backs occur. Everyone agrees with the simple model, adding CO2 to the atmosphere slows the rate at which infra red light radiates back into space. Almost every climate scientist agrees there are positive feed backs that will be triggered as the temperature rises. The only question is at what temperature do those feed backs exceed what human action is doing and when that temperature is reached. If we don't do something we know it will happen we just don't know when.
Bad things will happen at just a couple of degrees warmer. Rain patterns will change, pests like mosquitoes will move, coastal cities will flood. No one talks about the bad things at 6C because they don't want to sound like crazy alarmists.
Is short-term weather forecast not a science?
Yes, it is a science. It makes predictions, then we see if those predictions were accurate.
Or does it only work when looking backwards?
Well, that's the part where we see if the predictions were accurate. So yes, sort of?
Prediction of climate is as much science as orbital mechanics predicting where the moon will be.
Right. Orbital mechanics was accepted when the observations ended up matching the predictions.
Sometimes you can't just wait. When the measurement can only be taken after catastrophic change has happened? What then?
Hopefully we decided to play the odds and prepare for the outcome that was 98% likely.
Remember, science doesn't prove anything. Proofs are for mathematicians. Climate Change is "less proven" than gravity because we've conducted thousands of controlled experiments confirming the details of gravity. We don't have a bunch of extra Earths lying around, so it's much more difficult to conduct controlled experiments that would confirm details and help improve the precision of the models and predictions.
Of course, you still have to be either a complete idiot or a selfish asshole to think that Climate Change is a hoax and bet your grandkid's existence on that 2% chance.
The vast majority of anonymous cowards flooding in throves every thread about climate change are not concerned citizens with opposing views and/or healthy skepticism.
They are part of a concerted, deliberate, organized campain to destroy the public's confidence in science, to paint scientists as an evil community with ulterior motives, to destroy the reputation of all climate scientists.
All for one purpose, and one purpose only: To destroy, or at least delay significantly, all efforts to effect political, social and economic changes that would hurt the corporate interests of the oil and gas industry.
As for those who don't fit this category, they're simply trolls, or people that just don't care. In other words: Sociopaths.
The questions never been if we'll survive. Homo sapiens has survived several ice ages without modern technology. 'We'll' survive if by 'we' you mean that the genome of the species will live on, we're very adaptive. The question is at what cost? The climate heating up affects global stability by affecting economies and more importantly the global food production. Europe right now - as someone living here - is quite stirred up by the refugee crisis from the middle-east that's caused by the Syrian civil war. Now, the current refugee crisis is large, it's the largest since the 2nd world war, but it's small peanuts compared to what we're facing if nothing is done to mitigate climate change.
If we just go on with 'we'll survive' attitude, we - as in, the post-industrialised economies accustomed to a level of wealth, peace, comfort and ease unknown to anyone a couple of generations back - will be facing the Syrian crisis times a hundred. Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator, pushing hundreds of millions or more likely billions of people to move northwards in search of shelter and survival. It's not something we can just ignore. Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'. We're not isolated from the rest of the world, if the developing nations fall into civil wars and chaos as Syria did, we're going to feel the effects. Not immediately, but we will. Not to mention that the climate will directly affect our own food production and stability
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy, and many of the same people are going: 'huh, climate's changing, no big deal, we'll manage.' Of course we'll fucking manage, but that doesn't mean we'll manage at the same standard of living and enjoying the same relative peace as we have now. I don't want to spend the remainder of my life in a world where societies are doing what they can to wall themselves off from the global community and fighting for scraps while the wealthy lock themselves off in gated communities watching the rabble fight over the scraps of rationed food and emergency housing as coastlines are flooding and global trade grinds to a halt as every country wishes to secure well being for themselves and not for the rest. I certainly don't want my kids (if I ever have any) to inherit just such a world and tell them: 'yeah, I know it sucks, but hey, look on the bright side: the species will survive. None of you or your grandkids will likely ever enjoy the standard of living I had in my youth, but hey, we'll be alive. Now off you go and do some fishing, I'll fire up the generator so we can cook up some food in the evening. Watch out for looters!"
There's 7 billion of us on the planet right now, and that figure by all estimates is going to keep growing until at least 10 if not more before stabilising. Of those billions, the vast majority is already staring to be negatively affected by the current change, and it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something. We can't stop the warming altogether, it's way too late for that, but we can still affect whether or not the generations that come after us will occupy a 21st century society, or a dystopia of a few extremely well off people and billions in poverty and internal conflict. The difference made by a few degrees in the global average temperature is massive, because once the tipping
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
There was a time when that was a valid position - but the predictions made 30,50,80 years ago have been proven correct well within their error bars. So what now? At what point do we stop saying "okay, you've been right so far, but there's no evidence that you'll continue to be right"? There's no way to prove with 100% certainty that predictions made today will be accurate except to wait and see. But the science has made accurate predictions so far, and the opposition is just people saying "I don't believe it". All the "unsettled science " is in the area of hammering out the exact details - narrowing the error bars so we have a better idea of exactly what we'll be facing, beyond "major problem" - the dominant forces and trends are all behaving as predicted.
The only area for doubt is whether some as-yet undiscovered side effect might re-stabilize things - but there's no evidence to suggest such a thing exists, so gambling the fate of our civilization on finding one would have to be done entirely on blind faith.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Science is disprovable. No scientific hypothesis can ever be proven "true." They can only be proven false, and thus replaced with a new hypothesis which will also eventually also be replaced when flaws are discovered. This is the principle of disprovability, and it is the foundation of scientific inquiry. People who push "settled science" are misinformed about what science actually is. When you accept a theory as truth, you're libel to misinterpret or assign different weight to data which confirms or conflicts with the theory, this is why belief taints scientific inquiry. Karl Popper wrote extensively about this.
"predictions made 30,50,80 years ago have been proven correct well within their error bars."
Which predictions are those? That we'd see the end of winter in the UK? That the glaciers in the Alps would all melt? That we'd see more and more hurricanes? That whole islands would disappear? That New York City would be underwater? That people would be fleeing from climate catastrophes and out-stripping our ability to feed them?
Tell us another one.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
What is it about any criticism of capitalism that is immediately conflated with extreme socialism?
Extremes of both socialism and capitalism are 'bad'* and have failure modes that are remarkably similar. Just as extremes of either right or left wing political parties start to resemble each other. The countries with the highest standards of living for the most people by a number of metrics (education, lifespan, social mobility, lowest delta between poorest and wealthiest) tend to have limited and well-regulated capitalism along with limited and well-regulated social policies.
*Yeah, my version of 'bad' may differ from yours.
So much wrong with all this, but I'll just hit the high points.
Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator
No it won't. This is why the rhetoric matters, and why "warmest year on record" is such utterly useless nonsense. One average temperature number for an entire planet bathed in gigatons of fluids is absurd to the point of insanity. Those fluids move energy. Lots of energy. The atmosphere and the oceans are both giant energy conveyors. "Global warming" does not mean everywhere on Earth gets uniformly warmer by some number. That's why you're not supposed to use the phrase anymore. Some places will in fact get colder. The equator won't get appreciably warmer. Instead the tropical zone will get broader. Heat pushes further north and south during the respective summers than it used to. Regardless though, agriculture at and near the equator is nearly irrelevant: 79% of the Earth's equator is ocean, where human agriculture is nonexistent.
Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'.
Except they're starving because of assholes like Robert Mugabe, not because of climate anything (or weather, for that matter). Productive farmland became a desolate waste because people stopped farming, not because crops wouldn't grow. African starvation is the result of African land management policies and "charitable" donations of millions of tons of food from the developed world over decades that drove local farmers out of business, not CO2.
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy
Considering those brown people caused their own state of anarchy, Europeans are perfectly justified in demanding they stay the hell home and fix their own problems. A mass migration of millions is totally unjustified by any climate rhetoric, but you've been forcefed so many half-truths and lies about climate that you've become too blind to see the real causes of mass migrations. In short, they heard you're giving away free stuff and will accept the bullshit excuse of "climate refugee" as a reason for why they should get your free stuff. Maybe you can absorb a "few millions" and keep your cultural identity, but I doubt it, so you might want to consider self-preservation before you try to cure all the other ills of the world.
You spin a whole dystopian vision of the future at this point, which I'm not going to bother to quote because it too is crap. All food is local, with the exception of a handful of over-populated islands. Americans, and yes, Europeans too, have been getting fat while Africans starve, since time immemorial. It's just become fashionable since the '80s to notice and wring your hands about it, then butt in and make the problems worse. In the nearly 40 years since, Africa has had more than enough food to feed itself, and not enough, and good years or bad, the worst problem is politics, not climate.
...it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something.
That's racist.
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