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Climate Change Report Actually Understates Threats (thebulletin.org)
"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic," writes Slashdot reader Dan Drollette. "It ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer." From their article:
These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic's sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic's warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.
By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."
Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."
By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."
Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."
Um, hard to know where to start, basically your entire post is disconnected from actual facts. The UN report was dire, but didn't include the effects of methane locked in permafrost.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qv9nm7/unpacking-the-devastating-un-report-on-climate-change
The ranking in TFA mixes companies and countries. If you look at just the latter, you see:
1 China (Coal) 14.32%
6 Coal India 1.87%
8 Russia (Coal) 1.86%
15 Poland Coal 1.16%
So we're 4th, beaten only by [sub-]continent spanning major countries, despite ours population of mere 38.5M.
All greenhouse gas reduction activity was not only stopped but even reversed by our glorious National Communist government: they actually open new mines and coal power plants, and made some forms of better energy generation basically illegal (like, "quiet zones" required around any new or modernised wind generators mean you can't put them pretty much anywhere).
Getting a high place in a per-population contest isn't hard, doing "well" in absolute numbers when compared to much more populous countries is quite an accomplishment. So our "Good Change" regime did make Poland a "leading country" after all!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
the runaway warming does not continue indefinitely like it did last time.
Idiot. Every single IPCC report has understated the danger because they didn't want to be accused of being scare mongers. They did this by suppressing the more extreme projections in favor of the less extreme ones. And this information is publicly available in the articles about how they put together the reports.
It is true that they also suppressed the extremely understated projections, but their influence on mean values would have been considerably less. That's the way calculations of mean deviation work.
The IPCC has intentionally tried to be only somewhat alarmist rather than accurately reporting what the projections indicate. They hoped in this way to gain political acceptance that there was a real problem. I feel this strategy has backfired, with many claiming that they're alarmist anyway, and most just ignoring them. But they were trying to be cautious.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
and his hyperbole doesn't exactly help. But you're strawmaning. The article isn't predicting no ice in the Arctic, it's saying the same thing every scientific report does: global temps are rising by a few degrees and that will have far reaching impacts on weather, droughts and our ability to grow food.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Grab a bag and pass the soda, this is gonna be great. What excuses will we hear today? How are we going to justify ignoring science and instead trust the spin of the industry this time?
I really hope for something new, just sticking fingers into ears and going "lalala, I can't hear you" is getting old.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You might recall back in the 60 that by the year 2000 the U.S. would have over 300 million people and we would be starving and eating each other ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well it's 2018 and a 1/3rd of the world is now Obese ( http://www.healthdata.org/news... ) Small child must be very filling.
UN Predicts 50 Million Climate Refugees by 2010
Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.
It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world’s media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.
But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: “It is not a UNEP prediction,” a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP’s website. —Spiegel Online
2000 no more snow in the UK
In March 2000, , “senior research scientist” David Viner, working at the time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, told the U.K. Independent that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he was quoted as claiming in the article, headlined “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
1864 Father of American Environmentalism predicts imminent destruction of environment
As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’
–Google Books Readings In Environmental Impact page 111
No. It was scary 20 years ago. For those that listened. By now they are desperate as they see what is coming.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But first, let me demonstrate what a pile of horseshit you just linked to.
The article was written in 2014, based in data through 2013, and talks about a "15 year pause in global warming". 2013 - 15 = 1998. 1998 when it happened was the hottest year ever by a huge margin --an outlier. It was also a massive El Niño year, and El Niño is a weather event that produces unusually warm years..
This is a classic technique of statistical misrepresentation: cherry picking a baseline to obtain the comparison you want. If you start in 1997 or 1999, the "disappearance" of warming disappears. If you use a moving average, even just a *two year* moving average, the disappearance also disappears. In other words, the supposed pause is just statistical horseshit.
Cherry picking a baseline year is possible because weather isn't climate. Some years are warmer than the underlying climate trend and others are cooler than the trend. Sometimes you have a run of several years that are over or under, and in fact this is normal with real data. It's just like flipping a coin 13 times. It's normal to get runs of heads and tails, even with a fair coin.
El Niños, which produce warm years, and La Niñas, which produce cool years, are not predicted by climate models because they are both random weather events, like flipping a coin.
Of the 15 years of the Horseshit Pause, six were La Niña event years, a number of them particularly strong ones, however some of them were record warm years for La Niñas. Five were El Niño years, but relatively weak ones. So basically over the Horseshit Pause, we had a run of events which produce cooler weather than the underlying climate trend; even so the Horseshit Pause was the warmest decade on the instrumental record.
Now you extend the Horseshit Pause period to include the following four years, you happen to get the four hottest years on the instrumental record: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014. Note that 2016 and 2015 were El Niño, but 2017 was a La Niña year and should have been a cool one.
More to the point, if you make the run of years just a little bit longer supposed inconsistency of the climate models from the weather record disappears.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sadly, this may just be what ends up killing civilization. Not their fault, this type of threat is unique in human history.
Yes and no. Considering the "flood myths" all over the planet, and that during the last "ice age" the sea level rose (min.) three times about 10m "over night", and that the total sea level rise was over 100m and happened during less than 1000 years, it is not that unique. We just don't know anything about mankind before the "ice age".
Look at this map: https://static.wixstatic.com/m...
(Sorry, can not find the site where I found this the first time. There they had a side by side comparission of the current world with that picture)
If the world was settled at that time with a high level civilization, lets say on the level of UK around 1800, and mostly living around the costs and lower level areas, 99% of the world population would have died due to the melting ice.
Do you see how much bigger India is, Australia is, Indonesia connected with Australia and a "continent" and not a chain of islands? Japan connected with China, China expanding to the south east, South America dramatically bigger. England connected with Europe. You nearly could walk over to Iceland :D
Thousands more islands in the pacific. What is not visible, the Mediterranean sea is dry land, likely the red sea, too.
Or check this: https://www.donsmaps.com/icema...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Tell me something, "angel", what is a greater threat to humanity? Global warming or nuclear power? The answer cannot be "both" or "neither" as something must be of greater concern, if only by a small margin.
If global warming is the greater threat then we should be building more nuclear power plants instead of shutting down the ones we have. If nuclear power is the greater threat then it gets back to my point of no one believing the threats. People are building nuclear power plants and they are building new homes and businesses in places which the global warming alarmists claim will be underwater in 10, 20, 30, or 80 years. Cities plan for the next 100 years all the time. If city planners honestly believed that portions of their city would be underwater from global warming induced sea level rise then they'd be building sea walls or denying permits for any new construction.
The predictions of CO2 induced gloom and doom have failed over and over again, year after year. I'm being hyperbolic in saying no one believes these predictions, just as I am by saying that Miami would be underwater in 10 years, but not by much. It's easy to find predictions of Miami being underwater in 30 or 80 years just as it is easy to find people that live like frontiersmen to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible. They might go on eating home grown potatoes and reading by beeswax candles in their sod house, but these people are rare.
I've seen these predictions for a long time now, ever since I was able to read, that global warming threatened to kill us all and that wind and solar power would save us. Well, the predictions of cheap and plentiful wind and solar power keep failing, as well as the environmental collapse from CO2. I'm finding it real hard to take any of this seriously, especially when these same people that demand we reduce our CO2 also demand we not use nuclear power. Well, pick one. It's come to a point now that we can't have both if such doom awaits us. We need solutions and they aren't coming as promised. One of the two has to be the greater risk to humanity, I just want someone to tell me which so I can act on it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Um, hard to know where to start, basically your entire post is disconnected from actual facts. The UN report was dire, but didn't include the effects of methane locked in permafrost.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...
Let's assume this is true, that if we don't reduce CO2 output to 50% of current levels by 2050 then we face severe and detrimental environmental effects from global warming. We know of four "zero carbon" energy sources today, wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear. Maybe people will toss in few more like geothermal and bio-fuels but I don't hear too much about those, likely because they come with other environmental impacts that we'd like to avoid. If the effects of CO2 are so dire then maybe we should be building more nuclear power plants to replace coal? If we cannot have nuclear power to stop this global threat to human survival then I have to wonder just how real of a threat this is. Even after decades of subsidies for wind and solar they still have not matched the "zero carbon" output from nuclear power. Nuclear power did have a head start, I'll grant that much, but nuclear power also had a near stop in any new construction for 40 years.
We've been waiting for 40 years for wind and solar to save us, how much longer can we wait?
There will come a point in which we must choose, nuclear power or global warming, because it is going to become abundantly clear that wind and solar will not save us.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"We've been waiting for 40 years for wind and solar to save us, how much longer can we wait?" 40 years? get real, you need to get rid of the fossil fuel/nuclear lobby and its buying of politicians then renewables can really get going.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Really? 95% of climate scientists, ones that actually have degrees that pertain to climate science instead of idiots like Sen. Inholfe, have all agreed on an agenda? And precisely what is this agenda? Don't hold back, lay it on us. Be sure to reference real scientific journals...unless, of course, you believe they too are in on some con.
Stop watching TV, it is bad for you.
Which it does, sometimes. Like the filling of the Mediterranean & Black Seas, or when ice dams in Canada gave way atthe end of the last ice age.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
*incompehesible muttering and rambling*...socialist shithole...*more of the same*
What you claim he/she to have said and what he/she actually wrote seem to be two very different things.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
You know, the ozone layer threat was (and still is, although it's slowly recovering) a real thing, and only because we eventually got every single country to agree and ban certain chemicals, it was slowed down and finally started to recover (giving the clueless know-it-all's a chance to claim the threat was a hoax; sometimes I wonder if we should have just let it continue and not having to hear this BS now, although not seriously).
"In 1976 atmospheric research revealed that the ozone layer was being depleted by chemicals released by industry, mainly chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Concerns that increased UV radiation due to ozone depletion threatened life on Earth, including increased skin cancer in humans and other ecological problems[4], led to bans on the chemicals, and the latest evidence is that ozone depletion has slowed or stopped."
Today, not even most climate sceptics wouldn't claim that the "scare" was unfounded, false or hoax... But then there are total nutcases, like you apparently, who prefer to not actually read anything outside of their prejudices.
Read a bit for a change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer#Depletion
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Unfortunately the qualified scientists often have agendas to push, so you can't be sure how thorough and unbiased their statements are.
The beauty of science is that if some scientist is wrong they can be shown to be wrong by other scientists. That's what happens when you base your results on reality. Science it one of the most competitive fields of human endeavor where nearly every scientist wants to one-up the other scientists.
Well, I am a physicist and I follow energy policy closely and especially the energy transition in Germany. In the first article you there is so much wrong, it would take quite some time to take it apart. But a couple of comments: It is not a secret how the German electricity price is composed and neither is where the price increase comes from. The article makes it sound like a mystery and then blames it on an effect which isn't really that important at the moment. A large part of the increase of the electricity price actually comes from the feed-in tariff for renewables (and because we know this from actual numbers it is also clear that the explanation put forward of the article is not the reason). It is not surprising that if you support the development of renewables using a feed-in tariff and then this is successful and the share of renewables increases then also the corresponding fees increase and the overall power price. Now, other technologies like nuclear also got a huge amount of subsidies for development but those were paid from general taxes so did not affect the price. So only discussing the electricity price is misleading from the onset. Now using a feed-in tariff for renewables instead of general taxes was entirely intentional: The idea was to increase the price to also encourage saving (and electricity consumption is in fact on a slight downward trend in Germany). Now, there are couple of other important things to unerstand: Although the increase in price is largely due to the fee it is still a relatively small part of the overall cost, there are other taxes and fees which make electricity expensive in Germany and which are mostly unrelated to renewables (e.g. Germany maintains one of the most reliable grids). Second, the feed-in tariff was very successful: In created a huge market for wind and solar that then caused a huge drop in prices so that the fees are expected to again decrease in the future. In contrast, nuclear never got cheaper so the huge amount of tax-payer money spend for development did not nearly achieve similar effects.