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3-5 Degree Rise in Arctic Temperatures Called 'Inevitable' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found.
Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate "tipping point" as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect. "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic," said Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of UN Environment...
Even if all carbon emissions were to be halted immediately, the Arctic region would still warm by more than 5C by the century's end, compared with the baseline average from 1986 to 2005, according to the study from UN Environment. That is because so much carbon has already been poured into the atmosphere. The oceans also have become vast stores of heat, the effect of which is being gradually revealed by changes at the poles and on global weather systems, and will continue to be felt for decades to come.
The findings were presented at the UN Environment assembly Wednesday, where a report written by 250 scientists and experts from over 70 countries also warned that "damage to the planet is so dire that people's health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken."
Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate "tipping point" as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect. "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic," said Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of UN Environment...
Even if all carbon emissions were to be halted immediately, the Arctic region would still warm by more than 5C by the century's end, compared with the baseline average from 1986 to 2005, according to the study from UN Environment. That is because so much carbon has already been poured into the atmosphere. The oceans also have become vast stores of heat, the effect of which is being gradually revealed by changes at the poles and on global weather systems, and will continue to be felt for decades to come.
The findings were presented at the UN Environment assembly Wednesday, where a report written by 250 scientists and experts from over 70 countries also warned that "damage to the planet is so dire that people's health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken."
First one referenced mid-century, second one referenced end of century. It'll eventually get bad. Just a question of whhow many of us will live to see it
I'm sure some "cogent, studied, factually-handy, helpful and altruistic" Republican friends will be here to child-splain to us that this is all a hoax, inevitable, not happening, but also unstoppable and we shouldn't try.
We at some point have to listen to science. Obviously since we haven't kicked these long-time-oil-funded denialists to the curb entirely, we aren't to that point yet.
So the question becomes : How long are we going to entertain these no-credential no-science-background 1950's "I got mine's" and their Fox News hot air before we ignore them and begin to really address this?
I'm tired of their lies, always the same predictable shit in the face of scientific facts they will never acknowledge - and never read except to take single lines out of context as if that debunks the rest of it.
It's time to debunk their Big Tobacco playbook and forget them.
What's Draconian? That you might have to eat meat only once a day (healthier anyway)? Or that you might have to take an electric train on a 500 mile trip, not fly in a fossil-powered Spam can? Or that you'll have to drive in an electric or hydrogen car, not a hydrocarbon-belcher? Or that your apples might not come in a wasteful plastic bubble pack? Or that you might end up telecommuting a few times a week or even (OMG!) live in a more urban area or small town closer to your job? Or that your electricity might come from clean nuclear and renewables, not a coal-burning smog-belcher? OMG, the horror!!! Society will move on, just like it did when the EPA was introduced and car exhaust no longer smelled like an oil rig, rivers no longer caught fire, and bird populations increased as DDT was banned...
Think about this. The French, Swiss, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese all have industrialized, happy societies while belching out about 1/3 of the CO2 emissions per person of the US. Lowering CO2 emissions doesn't have to come with a dramatic lowering of the standard of living. It's mainly an engineering problem...
Been there, done that. Tee-shirt is found in the mud and or ice cores. So plan on six meters of sea level rise.
http://academic.emporia.edu/ab...
If we get all the way to the Pliocene we could have 25 meters of sea level rise. Wikipedia has plenty on the Pliocene Climactic Optimum, so you can look it up yourself.
I think the point is to make us think global warming should be super scary. In fact global warming will merely lead to an expansion of the agriculture belt, with the equatorial belt growing the most. Thus we will get more better stuff, especially jungle fruits and olive trees. Will it lead to more better other stuff? Only time and common sense will tell. It seems likely that rivers near the equator will become more powerful and insanely cold places may be less insanely cold.
Hmm, I guess I'll trust your uninformed speculation over the thousands of people who study this stuff for a living.
I was thinking about taking up smoking, now a lot of doctors told me that would be really bad for my heath, but maybe you've got some hunch that it will exercise my lungs?
I stole this Sig
When you have nothing constructive to say, resort to death threats.
Lowering CO2 emissions has just been declared meaningless (or nearly so). If enough warming to melt arctic (and presumably antarctic) ice is "inevitable", then restricting CO2 emissions hardly matters.
Only if we give up. If we decided to come up with some scheme for forced cooling, then we'd still want CO2 reduction, so as not to be making the problem worse while trying to make it better. Also, the more CO2 there is in the air, the worse the air gets for mammals. We're mammals. It still matters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The other 2/3's is Al Gore flying around on his jet preaching about climate change.
If you look at the "recommendations" section, you can see what they want us to do:
"Current patterns of consumption, production and inequality are not sustainable....[Solutions] include changes in lifestyle, consumption preferences and consumer behaviour on the one hand, and cleaner production processes, resource efficiency and decoupling, corporate responsibility and compliance on the other hand. ...Efforts to combat biodiversity loss must also address poverty eradication, food security challenges, gender inequality, systemic inefficiencies and corruption in governance structures and other social variables.
So there it is, that's what we have to do to stop global warming: you need to change your consumption preferences, and all those social variables.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DON'T want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we don't want more plants and animals and trees, no.
Even if your incoherent rambling made any sense at all, how is the extra CO2 in the atmosphere going to help plants and trees and more biodiversitym, considering the rate at which we are also destroying forests?
Here, educate yourself a bit.
Carbon is not the only grernhouse gas, nor the most potrnt one.
You're welcome.
True, but it's among the longest lived.
Gases like methane are more potent initially but they break down much faster (maybe 20 years for methane to turn into CO2).
CO2 can hang around for hundreds of years, maybe even 1000 years.
Right now though, 20 years is still far too long. I'll give you that.
No sig today...
That renewables are not going to save us. And that we need to switch to nuclear ASAP in order to save the planet? How much longer are they going to oppose nuclear power, insisting that the only way to fix things is with renewables? Because their opposition is really the only thing stopping us from solving the CO2-induced global warming problem once and for all. None of the climate change skeptics have a problem with nuclear power (well, maybe the coal and oil industries do). It's only the environmentalists preventing us from solving global warming.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the endgame. After we've replaced fossil fuels with nuclear power, we can still work on developing renewables (and battery tech). And as they become more capable, we can shut down nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. But what's important here and now is to get us off of fossil fuels ASAP. And right now that means replacing all our base load fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants.
Here's the problem: if you approach all those top-down, "we're doing this because climate", it won't stick. People will rebel because they will hate changing hard habits for what to them looks like a speculation (and it is -- there is no way to disprove or even verify the entire climate change theory). The car exhaust, the rivers on fire, the decreased bird populations, all of that was obviously wrong, it smelled like death -- it made living creatures that we are recoil. Not so with climate change: it's an abstract, dry, unbelievable, unrelatable theory to most of us.
Approach all those you mentioned bottom up and focus on reducing pollution; in the process you will likely reduce the carbon footprint. If the theory is correct, great. If it isn't, we will still benefit from less harm to living things.
It's irrelevant as to whether the Earth has ever been warmer or colder (no-one is denying that). It's whether we can save (most) of our current lifestyles by making significant, but not too uncomfortable changes to them. And quickly. When the Earth was previously hotter or colder, and Man was either not here, was not causing the changes, or didn't have the capacity to change them, is not really an important point of discussion. Man is here now, (likely) causing the changes, and (hopefully) has the ability and willingness to do something about it.
Spoken like a true ignoramus, Sun is the best known component of the entire complex problem. We know exactly what it has been doing the entire Earth's history and what it will continue to do for the remainder of it. But, by all means, do explain how younger Sun caused climates warmer than today, with numbers pretty please.
so solar output doesnt matter now when talking about climate but it matters suddenly in the juriassic?
Solar output has slowly increased over billions of years as the Sun has gotten older and denser. It was not "suddenly".
Is NOTHING compared to the age of the Earth
Suppose you're setting on the couch in your home, and you feel a bit cold. You look around to see that somebody left a window open.
How long, relative to age of the Earth, should you wait until you conclude that the open window is the cause of the cold ?
Mr. Anderson.
USA is the second or third biggest emitter, so it matters.
USA has besides Kuwait and some other exotic places the highest emission per capita: hence for them it is the easiest to reduce emissions. China can't, albeit they are working hard on renewables, nukes and electric cars/buses.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Look at Venezuela. They completely eliminated their carbon footprint last week..
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
China also has over 4 times the population, which means each Chinese citizen is outputting half the CO2 as each American. You're suggesting that the people who are already doing twice as good as you do better while you do nothing.
I'd also like to see a citation for China emitting twice as much as the US in 2018. I can't find one up to date. What I do find is that China is actually decreasing it's CO2 emissions (they're actually basically stable) unlike America which is once again increasing them.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
We should research everything, and scale up what works.
We have, only nuclear scales. Also, Thorium and MSRs scale better than LWRs.
It is nerds, not politicians, who will save the world.
Couldn't agree more.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."