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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).
You talking about the photo of a polar bear that was supposed to be 'the face of climate change"? That was taken by SeaLegacy, a definitively non-scientific PR environmental group. The photo and label were strongly shot down as being inaccurate by scientists and local residents, the same scientists that do say polar bear populations are declining in many places due to climate change (the local population was doing well at the time). Thing is, the scientists prefer hard data and long-term studies, not cheap photo shoots or one-off examples.
Scientists do not support laziness. If there was clear evidence that predictions were wrong and it was shot down due to bias or conspiracy rather than actual error, there would be a large kerfuffle and a lot of scientists would lose their jobs if clear this were ever to come out.
Each and every scientist would know that the first time they let this pass or got involved, it would mean they are complicit, and their careers would be permanently over as soon as anyone found out. Further, they know that there is enough support and money behind climate change denial that they'd get support and protection, and likely a lot of money, if they would whistle-blow.
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. Logic and reason be damned, it's all about the degrees a person has achieved. Einstein was spot-on when he responded to the 100 authors opposed to him; it would only take one to prove him wrong, there is no "strength in numbers".
And as far as climate science goes, 95% of the models say that the data is wrong; however, as Richard Feynman so succinctly stated, if your theory (guess) disagrees with experiments/data - your theory is wrong. And in this case, the theories are pretty much wrong - at least 95% of them.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That a recent study conducted on beliefs showed that most people who believed global warming was a hoax also believed in the New World Order, ancient aliens, that vaccines caused autism, that JFK was murdered by his own government and/or that their government was trying to replace them with muslims.
I'm honestly curious why we even bother to discuss things, in that case. I have no objection to you believing whatever you like, but as people like that most certainly DO object to me holding to my views, I see no benefit in bothering to debate things. No, I don't hold those conspiracy theorists in high esteem, but why should that bother them? If they were secure in their views, it would be irrelevant.
Does it really cause that much distress to anyone if we use solar rather than coal for power plants? You get exactly the same amount of power, or maybe more with solar these days. How is that interfering with your lifestyle? Does it really cause a problem to argue that Brazil and Indonesia should stop producing cash crops and replant rainforest? Wow, a few products you weren't even buying anyway go up in price by all of five cents. The agony. Let me see if I can shed a tear... wait... wait... sorry, no.
For crying out loud, it has bugger all impact on anyone here. Not even your 401K will be affected, since the stock brokers will all transfer together, causing the stocks they switch to to skyrocket in price. Ok, you might actually make quite a lot of money on that.
That's it. That's all the affect YOU will ever notice. You becoming a little bit richer, in a few years.
I mean. The tragedy of having more money to spend.
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)
Actually, those very models (Tree rings, Ice cores) are constantly adjusted so that they better fit surface temperature records over the last hundred years. Specifically, the same surface data that showed significant cooling from the 1930s to 1970s and was massaged out of the record. Whenever someone finds a model that doesn't agree with the current consensus, they tweak and correct their models until they provide the conclusion they were seeking. e.g. Doctored Data, Not U.S. Temperatures, Set a Record This Year . This happens, by the way, in much less politically charged scientific fields than climate science. P-Hacking is a frequent and constant challenge in much less politicized fields, including medicine and physics.
There's a great video out there by Tom Heller who calls out many of my own frustrations. I personally am a big believer in the scientific method and the scientific community in general. But it would be ignorant to claim that climate science was completely apolitical and there was no fraud or misrepresentation whatsoever.
Yeah, but not world wide. Far north and far south you still will have tempered regions, question however is what kind of weather (aka storms) you have and what and how much you can grow. Around the equator it mostly will depend on your distance to the sea ... at least during the last glacier periods at the equator the temperature was more or less the same as right now. So except inside of Africa, I doubt those areas will get much warmer. However: again the question is changing rain patterns. Phillippines and Indonesia had a drought last year and partly this year and heavy floodings several times this year (I don't remember last year). Thailand is unusually dry to, at least in the north west.
No, literally every life form over 5 kg does seem to have become extinct during the Permian extinction event world wide and the oceans became largely dead zones. You can try to make a 10C increase in temperature sound like a minor event, nothing to worry about, just a Chinese hoax. Personally I would rather avoid that scenario if I could and not just because of the climatic changes. Keep in mind we haven't even begun to discuss the social and political upheaval (a.k.a. famine and wars) caused by scenarios like the entire interior of Africa becoming uninhabitable.