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Climate Change Will Have Dire Consequences For US, Federal Report Concludes (cnn.com)
A new US government report delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts on the health and economy of the country. From a report: The federally mandated study was released by the Trump administration on Friday, at a time when many Americans are on a long holiday weekend, distracted by family and shopping. Coming from the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was put together with the help of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists. It's the second of two volumes. The first, released in November 2017, concluded that there is "no convincing alternative explanation" for the changing climate other than "human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases."
The report's findings run counter to President Donald Trump's consistent message that climate change is a hoax. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, "Whatever happened to Global Warming?" as some Americans faced the coldest Thanksgiving in over a century. But the science explained in these and other federal government reports is clear: Climate change is not disproved by the extreme weather of one day or a week; it's demonstrated by long-term trends. Humans are living with the warmest temperatures in modern history. Even if the best-case scenario were to happen and greenhouse gas emissions were to drop to nothing, the world is on track to warm 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. As of now, not a single G20 country is meeting climate targets, research shows.
The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat. Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield. Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall between 0.60% and 1.35% over the next 12 years -- having already cost the industry $1.2 billion from heat stress in 2010. Further reading: Climate Change Will Cost US Economy Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, Government Says in Sweeping Report (Reuters); Climate Change 'Will Inflict Substantial Damages on US Lives' (The Guardian); Climate Change Is Already Hurting U.S. Communities, Federal Report Says (NPR); Major Trump Administration Climate Report Says Damages Are 'Intensifying Across the Country' (The Washington Post); and Climate Impacts Grow, But U.S. Can Adapt, Says New Report (National Geographic).
The report's findings run counter to President Donald Trump's consistent message that climate change is a hoax. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, "Whatever happened to Global Warming?" as some Americans faced the coldest Thanksgiving in over a century. But the science explained in these and other federal government reports is clear: Climate change is not disproved by the extreme weather of one day or a week; it's demonstrated by long-term trends. Humans are living with the warmest temperatures in modern history. Even if the best-case scenario were to happen and greenhouse gas emissions were to drop to nothing, the world is on track to warm 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. As of now, not a single G20 country is meeting climate targets, research shows.
The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat. Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield. Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall between 0.60% and 1.35% over the next 12 years -- having already cost the industry $1.2 billion from heat stress in 2010. Further reading: Climate Change Will Cost US Economy Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, Government Says in Sweeping Report (Reuters); Climate Change 'Will Inflict Substantial Damages on US Lives' (The Guardian); Climate Change Is Already Hurting U.S. Communities, Federal Report Says (NPR); Major Trump Administration Climate Report Says Damages Are 'Intensifying Across the Country' (The Washington Post); and Climate Impacts Grow, But U.S. Can Adapt, Says New Report (National Geographic).
To expand on that, if the median household income in the Southeast is around $50,000, and there are typically 1.4 workers per household, that would be about $18 per hour, on average. Assuming you lose 0.012 hours per week, that would be about 0.6 hours per year of work (assuming 2 weeks vacation).
So if the cost of climate change abatement is more than ($18 * 0.6) about $11 per year per worker, it is actually an economic loser to try to address it. Better to "accept the loss" of 0.012 hours per week, than spend even more money to try to save that amount of economic activity.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ok, sure.
http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrh...
Prediction: An increase in CO2 will result in net increase in global temperatures.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital...
There's the global temperature
https://www.climate.gov/news-f...
Only the results over overlapping timeframes are relevant. As you can see, the prediction is matched with observation and has not been falsified.
Are you satisfied? Of course not! Because this was never about facts, this was about your fears that science might contradict something important to you.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Unless you can show us your credentials to be making authoritative statements about climate science (a PhD in it from an accredited University will do), you need to shut the fuck up about things you know NOTHING about.
I'm sure you say the same thing about politicians, too! Unless you have a law degree and a decade or more of experience, you have NO RIGHT to criticize any politician.
False equivalence. I don't agree with Rick Schumann's tone, but he's in the right here.
Scientists and politicians have a different covenant. Scientists observe the universe and present explanations for what they see. Politicians present their proposals to an electorate and seek a mandate for carrying them out. You don't vote on science. You do vote on public policy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It can't be reversed now even with major changes to carbon consumption (not that that would ever happen with both sides taking tons of cash from the energy lobbyists).
Nirvana fallacy. Just because a perfect solution doesn't exist doesn't mean reducing our CO2 emissions can't help. It might be too late to avoid a 2C temperature raise. But let's avoid a 5C raise. And if it's too late, then let's avoid a 10C raise.
By the time the temp increase passes 5C we are moving into great Permian extinction territory. By the time you get to 10C every life form heavier than 5 kg is likely going to become extinct ... at least that's what happened back then.
The first graph shows temperatures rising from 1895 to 1943.
The second graph shows temperatures rising from 1957 to 2005.
Conclusion: Temperatures are rising, no surprise there. The graphs are similar because ever since the industrial revolution, global average temperatures have been rising.
I don't know why you or this "Willis Eschenbach" would think that 1895-1943 is a "Natural" period, unaffected by CO2 emissions. Well I do, actually. You're climate-trolling, of course.
Actually, the number is 570 billion hours per year (see the full chapter 19) though the slashdot wording, taken from the CNN worded, which paraphrases the executive summary of chapter 19, does not make that clear.
We already have. More than 50% of the energy in Britain comes from renewables, about a fifth in the US. If we move the subsidies propping up coal to solar, we could have 100% generated by renewables within three Presidential terms. It's not difficult. Trump's removal of legitimate subsidies for an emergent technology in order to prop up coal will slow down the switch from coal to solar. Slow, not stop. It hasn't stopped, despite Trump's efforts to bankrupt the industry and finance a bankrupt, obsolete alternative.
It's that simple.
Solar is not difficult to mass produce and, with adequate funding to produce isotopically pure silicon (which we can now mass produce) along with the other mass-producible improvements to the energy output, the same number of panels produced can produce double the energy. Simple arithmetic would suggest you then need less than half the solar panels. (Lower transmission loss through fewer connections and less wiring.)
Since most people want solar heating, not solar electricity, to the home, it's trivial to have the government provide incentives to mass produce solar heaters (which don't require rare earths) and to encourage installation of those where they'd be of better value to the consumer, so as to conserve resources.
Reversing the taxes placed on solar power in Nevada and a few other States, mandating compensation, requiring all new homes have direct solar heaters or solar panels installed as part of the Federal building codes, and providing strong incentives to install (such as providing exactly the same subsidies to those selling solar energy to the grid as are currently provided to coal-fired power stations) would solve many of the problems.
I'm a fan of nuclear done right (waste contains radioisotopes that can be used to produce energy, so use them, sodium reactors can't have a meltdown, have superior efficiency and we have actually built those, there's no need to cut corners to save on costs since a good working reactor is cheaper than geoengineering by many orders of magnitude giving us plenty of margin). It takes ten years to build a reactor, although you can probably increase the parallelism to some extent.
If you go all-out on solar, and build a nuclear reactor in each State, then in ten years you should have ample power to completely eliminate fossil fuel.
I'd go further and build in each State the infrastructure and housing likely required for a fusion reactor, which I'd expect to be ready for construction in about ten years. If it isn't, you've housing that's more than adequate to house a fission reactor. Indeed, it should be of vastly superior grade. So, if fusion isn't ready, just build another fission reactor in each State. The modifications needed should be minor, if there are any at all. It's just a shell with easily maintained piping, generator and substation. (Since the subsidies for fossil fuel amount to $20 trillion a year, we can afford to go Manhattan Project on fusion for a ten year spree. If it can be solved at all, that should be more than sufficient.)
So in the worst case scenario, in ten years solar and nuclear are major players, with wind and geothermal next, and in twenty years solar and all forms of nuclear (regardless of whether that's just fission or not) have doubled capacity. That's 2030 and 2040 respectively.
Let's take that worst-case. We've doubled the energy from solar by capacity and again by efficiency. So, we're currently at 50 gigawatts, so that's 200 gigawatts. We subtract the 50 we currently have, since we're only looking at new capacity. 150 gigawatts. Since the US government official figures say that the current output is actually 50 terawatt hours, I am unsure exactly how the numbers are reached. But if we accept that both numbers are valid, then we end up with 200 terawatt hours of power, or 150 terawatt hours of increase.
The state of the art sodium reactors are 880 megawatts per reactor, which is 21120 megawatt hours per reactor. The best reactors out there have an output of 13
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)