Yeah! It's like saying that 97% of priest believe in god anyway.
No it isn't. Not even remotely close. Climate scientists don't BELIEVE anything. They know. And the reason they know is because they have a large set of validated repeated research and data to back up their conclusions. That is the strength of the scientific method. Climate scientists agree that the scientific results show anthropogenic global warming. No faith or belief is needed or required.
Plus that number means nothing, it would be foolish to say that human activity has no consequence, though what matters is how much.
According to the current orbital positioning and axial tilt, if things had remained the same (no additional CO2) the planet would have continued cooling. Based on physics originally discovered in 1824 by Fourier (and considerably improved upon since then), we know that greenhouse gases will warm the planet. Based on the isotope analysis of atmospheric carbon, we know that the CO2 influx has come from fossil fuels (C-13 vs. C-14). The recent consensus on how much we are contributing range from 80% to 120% due primarily to GHGs.
Also, science isn't about democracy. More than 60% of the scientists didn't believe in the movements of continents in the 50ies, yet it is admitted now.
Science isn't a democracy. That's why they surveyed peer-reviewed published papers instead of people. And the result of the survey of the current science (not people) show almost all of them agree that we are causing the change.
You seem to be forgetting about the laws of physics. In fact, we are already hitting them. You can't shrink transistors much more or you get slapped with Schrodinger's cat. The interconnects are already using fiber optics. You can only put machines so close to one another. So on and so forth.
When people have made claims before, it was due to either their idea of market forces or the limits of the current technology. Now, the actual physical limits are beginning to present roadblocks. Even if quantum computing becomes an everyday thing by 2020, you still have to get data to the QPU which still requires a speed-of-light limited data transfer to every node running the computation.
The problem isn't processing power or memory or even disk space. It's latency, and that is limited by the speed of light.
The interesting part is that they looked at the "habitats that these species now live in". They did not look at habitats that are not currently suitable for the species to live in. For all we know there could be more area that species could live in when the climate changed. By concentrating on current species ranges the scientists are skewing the results. One should look at the whole system before coming to a conclusion.
Oh but they have looked into it my friend. In fact some areas are already experiencing the lovely influx of new wildlife. Like the harmless little bark beetle that has been destroying acres upon acres of forests in Colorado. Or the migration northward of the harmless killer bee. In fact there have been several studies on the influx of invasive species and diseases due to a warming world, and the picture they paint isn't pretty.
Despite what you may think, scientists don't earn Ph.D's by being stupid.
ClearCase...only within the bowels of hell could such a hideous evil have been conceived. It drinks the blood of tormented programmers, and feasts upon their carcasses. Many programmers have gone mad just looking up it's hideous countenance. The mere utterance of it's name causes minds to crack and ears to bleed. Even Satan himself is leery of looking ClearCase in the eye. Religious programmers do not use the fear of god to keep their teams in line. They use the abomination known as ClearCase.
You can tell when a programmer has used ClearCase. All you need to do is walk up to them and whisper it. The eyes go wide. Sweat starts forming. They shake uncontrollably. They'll start backing away, or start muttering, "My happy place...I must go to my...happy place!". The physical wounds heal with time, but the psychological scars last a lifetime.
I've had the most unfortunate experience of using ClearCase before. I can honestly say I would rather have NO VERSION CONTROL than use ClearCase again. I'm not kidding. It is THAT bad. The team I was on stuck it out for about 2 months (I'll give them credit for lasting that long) and then we fled screaming to SVN. When we wiped the ClearCase machine, all the developers gathered around to watch like how villagers gathered around to watch a hanging. There was much rejoicing.
I've known people who quit the project and/or company they worked for because they were forced to use ClearCase. ClearCase transcends bad software. It is ABOMINATIONWARE.
Agreed. If you're a decent software developer then it doesn't matter what the latest buzzword tech is. Any developer worth their salt will be able to pick up and use a new language/tool/etc. in a short period of time.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind.
Hardly. You see, what happened with cold fusion was a couple then-scientists said they got neutron radiation out of their experiment along with heat production. They went public and it caused a sensation. However, they did this before others could duplicate their work. When other scientists tried to duplicate it, they failed. Upon review, it was shown that the original scientists at best were sloppy. Their work was summarily rejected.
In other words, science worked just the way it was supposed. Just like the recent kerfuffle over faster-than-light neutrinos.
The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't.
Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
I find this very hard to believe considering it took me all of 5 seconds to find link on the methodology.
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
He got a standing ovation;)
You're either leaving out critical information or this story is pure bullshit. Dropping the temperature to -78C will NOT precipitate CO2. Try reading up on partial pressures. Not only that, but producing the right conditions to have CO2 precipitate takes quite a bit of energy in and on itself.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter.
The feedbacks in place on this planet typical function over thousands of years. What's happening now is taking place over a 100 years. That's not lighting a couple of candles, that's dumping gasoline all over your apartment and setting it on fire.
It's not just the amount of warming, it's how fast it is occurring.
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one?
That's known as Milankovich cycles and it has to do with the natural orbital dynamics of the planet. It's not a feedback mechanism. And right now we should technically be cooling (an we were until we started burning fossil fuels in earnest).
Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
CO2 is not going to cool the plant. Fourier figured this out back in the early 1800's, and all the science done since then bears this out. Oh people have certainly tried to come up with negative feedbacks based on increased CO2, but none of them have stood up to the test. And now that scientists are runnin fully coupled climate models there is no evidence of a natural negative feedback from increasing CO2. In fact, they have been finding more positive feedbacks.
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run?
Neither. Our entire civilization depends on how the climate is. Climate shifts, even regional ones, can be quite painful to deal with an historically have caused whole civilization to collapse. And we could have kept things relatively stable if we hd started taking action 20 years ago, but we're way past that.
And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)?
There's plenty of peer-reviewed research to answer these questions, but in short yes to the first and no to the second.
And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
That's just one aspect that climate scientists are researching. It WOULD have been cheaper if we had started taking steps to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but at this point we're going to see at least a 2C rise (even if we stopped all CO2 production today). There is also little hope for any serious actions to be taken in the near future. We lack the will and global cohesion. Basically, I doubt any serious action will be taken until it "gets bad" but by then it will be far to late to prevent anything.
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Science is not opinion. It is also not a popularity contest. The science shows that the climate is changing. The science shows that this will result in negative impacts. The science, in this case, is showing "man change bad". Make of that what you want.
To see it flat line would mean we could produce no more CO2 than the natural carbon sinks can absorb, which means significantly reducing emissions. It would take a massive world-wide depression to even get close to that.
To see a dip in CO2, we would have to produce less CO2 emissions than the natural carbon sinks can absorb. We haven't been in that kind of situation since the early industrial revolution.
Lets face it: C++ is a mess. Use in anything but protected environment where the C++ code and runtime cannot be attacked is highly unprofessional and borders on gross negligence.
See what I did there?
Every computing language has flaws. Why? Because as of this moment we have no way to test every single possible logical outcome of program execution. There is always some edge case that is missed, some bug that goes undetected, etc. . People still find exploits in C libraries and they've been around for decades.
It's doubtful their study will hold up to scrutiny. After reading the actual study, they're using a simple climate model to feed a Baeysian statistical model to generate their results, which fails to take into account numerous factors. This seems exceptionally weak, especially since a few years of data can drastically alter the results. For example, if the last ten years had a few strong El Ninos that gave a warming signal stronger than the expected signal, their model could be made to show warming beyond even the worst IPCC projections. And if you applied their methodology to a decade where some slight cooling took place (like the late 60's to early 70's), it would appear that by this time we would be well on our way to an ice age by now. That's an incredibly wide error margin, and more than enough to cast doubts on their results.
ethanol may cause engine damage from water content in older engines Ethanol destroyes all the little O-rings in your fuel pump, destroyes your fuel lines and injectors.
Not really. It depends on what they're made of. The big problem is rubber. Ethanol degrades rubber over time, but modern cars use very little ethanol sensitive materials. You can get a flex-fuel kit for most modern cars for pretty cheap, and it usually just contains a couple of parts you need to replace.
Ethanol also reduces fuel economy so yes it does hurt the enviroment by introducing more co2 into our globally warmed atmosphere.
Not really. It reduces MPG since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline. It burns cleaner so there are less overall pollutants. As far as CO2 goes that depends on how the ethanol was produced to determine whether or not it's a gain or loss of CO2. Ethanol produces less CO2 when burnt, but ethanol from corn takes a lot of energy to make (tractors, electricity) so it omes out almost being a wash.
No it doesn't. People buy insurance because MOST don't have enough funds to cover things like car crashes, unexpected serious illnesses, etc. . These things happen and the LOGICAL response is to be prepared for them. At worst, that could be considered cautious.
However here is a fear that is irrational Climate change the climate always changes, day to day , year to year, century to century.
Weather != Climate. Climate changes TYPICALLY happen over 100's to 1000's of years, sometimes even longer. And the impacts of those changes on the life forms existing on the planet depend on how string and how fast those changes happen.
The changes, as indicated by all the research, observations, and data we have show that the climate is changing, and rapidly (decadal scale). There is no irrational fear here. The science says A is going to happen, evidence shows A is happening, and that there are consequences for A happening. Groups that are interested about these consequences and what their effects will be such as the DoD, DoE, insurance companies, agribusiness, etc. are incorporating the science into future plans to prepare for it.
And the difficulty will be was the damages caused by climate change or were you in a flood zone anyway.
What your describing is called attribution, an it's pretty easy to filter out such basic cases. Attribution of weather event to climate change is more difficult, but that's another matter. As water levels rise, flood zones will increase (at least in coastal areas). Storm surges will become more dangerous and travel further inland.
That's just an example, but these are things city planners and others need to be aware of when making long range plans. Otherwise, when those 1 in a thousand year events start becoming one every ten years there's going to be a heavy bill to pay.
and fearful governments afraid of being sued are complicit in this. A recent example I have is a local council declaring a flood zone in an area that would only flood if sea levels rose 2-3 metres insurance companies without question simply rose all premiums in the area $3000 -$7000 if you wanted flood insurance.
You don't seem to understand coastal flood zones very well. Storm surges, even those not driven by hurricanes, can easily exceed 2 or 3 meters. Even coastal winds can drive waves that size depending on where you live. And if such events have been shown to be happening more frequently in your area due to a combination of increasing extreme events, ocean rise, coastal erosion, etc. then it only make sense.
It did have an effect as people in this area were generally concerned about climate change now many I spoke to have seen the money maker it really is
You're going to need more than emotional appeal to win an argument. You have to get some real hard data and show WHY you think the increase is unnecessary. How often does the area flood? How much value does the area have? What is the projected increase in flooding events as sea levels rise? What is the projected increase of conditions that would lead to probable flooding? Insurance companies use a lot of information to estimate risks and determine premiums. If you don't have a solid provable case you basically just whining that your premiums had to go up to cover the increasing risk due to a changing climate.
This shouldn't be a surprise to you, as scientist have been saying these types of things would likely happen 30 years ago.
I don't think it is that bad (outright fraud). It is just bias run rampant along with financial incentive to underestimate uncertainty combined with widespread failure of science education in statistics.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Financial incentive? Really? When someone says something like this it makes me seriously wonder what kind of math is being taught in school these days. Here you criticize the math capabilities of scientists and yet you seem to fail at comprehending orders of magnitude.
OK kids, you can do this with a few minutes and Google. Look up the budget allocations for climate science for our country. Go ahead. Now look up the profits of just one of the major fossil fuel companies. For extra credit, just look up the profits for one financial quarter of that company. OK kids, no which one is bigger? If you answered the fossil fuel company, you are correct! Now is it just a little bit bigger or a lot bigger? If you said a lot bigger, then you are correct again! Give yourself a gold star!
Climate scientists do what they because they like what they do and are concerned. If they wanted to really make bank, they would sell out their morals and hop on the fossil fuel train.
Fair enough, but nobody is very interested in local climate in the immediate vicinity of one weather station. The fact that a paper was written is evidence that the importance of these measurements is being overstated...
I know this is slashdot, but if you actually read the freakin' paper you wouldn't make arguments that make you sound like you have a serious reading comprehension problem. More than "one weather" station was involved in the research.
...What is satisfying is seeing someone actually included the error margin. The climate models never seem to...
Yeah, I can tell you run in scientific circles. Have you even read a scientific paper before or do you just like making crap up to make yourself sound knowledgeable? Ever single paper on climate results (or pretty much any science paper at all), including those on model construction, comes with error bars.
There's a 30 year lag from the introduction of additional CO2 to when it's full effects are felt. So you are correct, even stopping now we would still continue to reap the "benefits" of a warming planet for several decades.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark. When numerous species die off, farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species, coastal cities become inundated, and lots of people die then maybe something will be done about it. But don't get your hopes up.
So, you came up with a model that accurately predicts the past?
No, that isn't how climate models are developed. They use known equations from various scientific branches, and build a reasonable simulation of climate processes with them. Then they use past observational data to kickstart the model and let it run from some point in the past to the present to see how well they modeled reality. The more accurate the data and the mathematical model, the better job it does.
That model is then initialized with a bunch of variations on current and future scenarios and run forward for some period of time (there are sometimes even thousands of variations). This is an ensemble. The results are then analyzed and used as a GUIDE.
Models are a tool for scientists. They are not the end-all be-all of scientific research.
What nonesense is that? The accuracy of a model can only be determined by testing it against reality, and not against the data it has been fitted to.
You fail to understand how climate models are developed. Climate models are not "fitted" to the data. They are COMPARED to the data. If a particular model result shows significant divergence from reality, then it is a problem with the theory. The model is not "tweaked" to make it replicate the past, otherwise it would fail whenever new components or new data was introduced (and they don't)
You seem to be largely ignorant of science and modelling. Again, models are the result of science, not the other way around. Models are tools.
You need new data to do that and I'm sorry to tell you that new annual data sets will arrive only at a pace of one per year.
The early computer climate models developed in the '70's and '80's ran ensembles to predict the direction of future climate 30 years out. They were remarkably accurate in their predictions, despite being very coarse and the low computational power available at the time.
Climate science is not some sort of independent branch of science that has no bearing on reality. Every aspect of climate science draws on long established theory from other branches, from chemistry to thermal dynamics. You seem to be implying that somehow, all of modern physics is a sham.
Meanwhile, shut up and look at the models you've made so far and be ashamed of the constant revisions in both directions
I'm not aware of any model that doesn't undergo constant revisions. Errors are found. Improvements are implemented. New data sets are available. New science is done. Every complex model is a reflection of the current state of the art of our understanding.
In any other branch of science coming up with the kind of models and inaccuracies that climate science comes up with, scientists would simply say.. well, sorry, we cannot model these processes with any degree of accuracy and be done with it.
But they can, and have. There's a ton of peer-reviewed science out there stating the case.
If you came up with a better model, well, good for you, but now you have to *prove* it is actually better than all the rest so far.
In comparison, climate change, here, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not going to get dramatically worse, if we don't do anything about it. For example, they generally forecast the loss of about as much land over the next century from rising water levels (assuming a one meter rise) as are lost each year from desertification due mostly to bad agricultural practices.
You're not thinking this through very well. Sea level rise magnifies events (storms, hurricanes, etc.) by increasing the surge dramatically. Imagine another 3 feet of water hitting NY on top of something like Sandy.
Also, sea level rise is only one factor. A larger issue is the rapid change in weather patterns. We're already seeing an increase in extreme events, including some we haven't seen before in particular areas, such as the arctic. This results in other changes like melting permafrost and severe coastal erosion.
And an even larger issue is climatic changes. For example, current projections show a marked decrease in precipitation over the grain belt. That is projected to happen within this century. That will have some significant consequences by itself, let alone other changes across the rest of the world.
You're also forgetting that according to paleoclimate studies, the rate of change we're seeing is happening incredibly fast. Changes even over the last century typically take hundreds to thousands of years. Other than super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts, we don't have a proxy to compare against to see how bad things could get (one of the reasons why scientists are running projections).
Climate change and it's impacts covers a very broad range of consequences. A fair number of those consequences we will be seeing before the end of our lifetimes.
So in summary, there is more value to nipping in the bud deliberately harmful human actions than there is with a slow moving human-induced natural change that just isn't that significant in the first place.
You are sadly misinformed. Read the IPCC or report or wait for the AR5 report. Or you can ignore the results and recommendations by the scientists and find out the hard way.
In the words of the Daily Show: "What he says makes sense. And if you don't think about it he makes even more sense."
Glenn Beck is about one thing and one thing only: Glenn Beck. He's not a moron. He's not stupid. He gets paid millions of dollars for spewing conspiracy laced nonsense across the airwaves. And his listeners love him for it.
Sure, any rational thinking person would listen to one show and say, "Wow, that guy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.". But then again, rational thinking people are not his target audience. He knows what he's doing, and I doubt he believes half of what he spews across the air.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! It's like saying that 97% of priest believe in god anyway.
No it isn't. Not even remotely close. Climate scientists don't BELIEVE anything. They know. And the reason they know is because they have a large set of validated repeated research and data to back up their conclusions. That is the strength of the scientific method. Climate scientists agree that the scientific results show anthropogenic global warming. No faith or belief is needed or required.
Plus that number means nothing, it would be foolish to say that human activity has no consequence, though what matters is how much.
According to the current orbital positioning and axial tilt, if things had remained the same (no additional CO2) the planet would have continued cooling. Based on physics originally discovered in 1824 by Fourier (and considerably improved upon since then), we know that greenhouse gases will warm the planet. Based on the isotope analysis of atmospheric carbon, we know that the CO2 influx has come from fossil fuels (C-13 vs. C-14). The recent consensus on how much we are contributing range from 80% to 120% due primarily to GHGs.
Also, science isn't about democracy. More than 60% of the scientists didn't believe in the movements of continents in the 50ies, yet it is admitted now.
Science isn't a democracy. That's why they surveyed peer-reviewed published papers instead of people. And the result of the survey of the current science (not people) show almost all of them agree that we are causing the change.
You seem to be forgetting about the laws of physics. In fact, we are already hitting them. You can't shrink transistors much more or you get slapped with Schrodinger's cat. The interconnects are already using fiber optics. You can only put machines so close to one another. So on and so forth.
When people have made claims before, it was due to either their idea of market forces or the limits of the current technology. Now, the actual physical limits are beginning to present roadblocks. Even if quantum computing becomes an everyday thing by 2020, you still have to get data to the QPU which still requires a speed-of-light limited data transfer to every node running the computation.
The problem isn't processing power or memory or even disk space. It's latency, and that is limited by the speed of light.
The interesting part is that they looked at the "habitats that these species now live in". They did not look at habitats that are not currently suitable for the species to live in. For all we know there could be more area that species could live in when the climate changed. By concentrating on current species ranges the scientists are skewing the results. One should look at the whole system before coming to a conclusion.
Oh but they have looked into it my friend. In fact some areas are already experiencing the lovely influx of new wildlife. Like the harmless little bark beetle that has been destroying acres upon acres of forests in Colorado. Or the migration northward of the harmless killer bee. In fact there have been several studies on the influx of invasive species and diseases due to a warming world, and the picture they paint isn't pretty.
Despite what you may think, scientists don't earn Ph.D's by being stupid.
ClearCase...only within the bowels of hell could such a hideous evil have been conceived. It drinks the blood of tormented programmers, and feasts upon their carcasses. Many programmers have gone mad just looking up it's hideous countenance. The mere utterance of it's name causes minds to crack and ears to bleed. Even Satan himself is leery of looking ClearCase in the eye. Religious programmers do not use the fear of god to keep their teams in line. They use the abomination known as ClearCase.
You can tell when a programmer has used ClearCase. All you need to do is walk up to them and whisper it. The eyes go wide. Sweat starts forming. They shake uncontrollably. They'll start backing away, or start muttering, "My happy place...I must go to my...happy place!". The physical wounds heal with time, but the psychological scars last a lifetime.
I've had the most unfortunate experience of using ClearCase before. I can honestly say I would rather have NO VERSION CONTROL than use ClearCase again. I'm not kidding. It is THAT bad. The team I was on stuck it out for about 2 months (I'll give them credit for lasting that long) and then we fled screaming to SVN. When we wiped the ClearCase machine, all the developers gathered around to watch like how villagers gathered around to watch a hanging. There was much rejoicing.
I've known people who quit the project and/or company they worked for because they were forced to use ClearCase. ClearCase transcends bad software. It is ABOMINATIONWARE.
Agreed. If you're a decent software developer then it doesn't matter what the latest buzzword tech is. Any developer worth their salt will be able to pick up and use a new language/tool/etc. in a short period of time.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind.
Hardly. You see, what happened with cold fusion was a couple then-scientists said they got neutron radiation out of their experiment along with heat production. They went public and it caused a sensation. However, they did this before others could duplicate their work. When other scientists tried to duplicate it, they failed. Upon review, it was shown that the original scientists at best were sloppy. Their work was summarily rejected.
In other words, science worked just the way it was supposed. Just like the recent kerfuffle over faster-than-light neutrinos.
The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't.
Yes they have: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html . It really isn't that hard to use Google.
Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
I find this very hard to believe considering it took me all of 5 seconds to find link on the methodology.
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
He got a standing ovation ;)
You're either leaving out critical information or this story is pure bullshit. Dropping the temperature to -78C will NOT precipitate CO2. Try reading up on partial pressures. Not only that, but producing the right conditions to have CO2 precipitate takes quite a bit of energy in and on itself.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter.
The feedbacks in place on this planet typical function over thousands of years. What's happening now is taking place over a 100 years. That's not lighting a couple of candles, that's dumping gasoline all over your apartment and setting it on fire.
It's not just the amount of warming, it's how fast it is occurring.
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one?
That's known as Milankovich cycles and it has to do with the natural orbital dynamics of the planet. It's not a feedback mechanism. And right now we should technically be cooling (an we were until we started burning fossil fuels in earnest).
Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
CO2 is not going to cool the plant. Fourier figured this out back in the early 1800's, and all the science done since then bears this out. Oh people have certainly tried to come up with negative feedbacks based on increased CO2, but none of them have stood up to the test. And now that scientists are runnin fully coupled climate models there is no evidence of a natural negative feedback from increasing CO2. In fact, they have been finding more positive feedbacks.
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run?
Neither. Our entire civilization depends on how the climate is. Climate shifts, even regional ones, can be quite painful to deal with an historically have caused whole civilization to collapse. And we could have kept things relatively stable if we hd started taking action 20 years ago, but we're way past that.
And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)?
There's plenty of peer-reviewed research to answer these questions, but in short yes to the first and no to the second.
And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
That's just one aspect that climate scientists are researching. It WOULD have been cheaper if we had started taking steps to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but at this point we're going to see at least a 2C rise (even if we stopped all CO2 production today). There is also little hope for any serious actions to be taken in the near future. We lack the will and global cohesion. Basically, I doubt any serious action will be taken until it "gets bad" but by then it will be far to late to prevent anything.
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Science is not opinion. It is also not a popularity contest. The science shows that the climate is changing. The science shows that this will result in negative impacts. The science, in this case, is showing "man change bad". Make of that what you want.
Why would there be?
To see it flat line would mean we could produce no more CO2 than the natural carbon sinks can absorb, which means significantly reducing emissions. It would take a massive world-wide depression to even get close to that.
To see a dip in CO2, we would have to produce less CO2 emissions than the natural carbon sinks can absorb. We haven't been in that kind of situation since the early industrial revolution.
Lets face it: C++ is a mess. Use in anything but protected environment where the C++ code and runtime cannot be attacked is highly unprofessional and borders on gross negligence.
See what I did there?
Every computing language has flaws. Why? Because as of this moment we have no way to test every single possible logical outcome of program execution. There is always some edge case that is missed, some bug that goes undetected, etc. . People still find exploits in C libraries and they've been around for decades.
It's doubtful their study will hold up to scrutiny. After reading the actual study, they're using a simple climate model to feed a Baeysian statistical model to generate their results, which fails to take into account numerous factors. This seems exceptionally weak, especially since a few years of data can drastically alter the results. For example, if the last ten years had a few strong El Ninos that gave a warming signal stronger than the expected signal, their model could be made to show warming beyond even the worst IPCC projections. And if you applied their methodology to a decade where some slight cooling took place (like the late 60's to early 70's), it would appear that by this time we would be well on our way to an ice age by now. That's an incredibly wide error margin, and more than enough to cast doubts on their results.
ethanol may cause engine damage from water content in older engines
Ethanol destroyes all the little O-rings in your fuel pump, destroyes your fuel lines and injectors.
Not really. It depends on what they're made of. The big problem is rubber. Ethanol degrades rubber over time, but modern cars use very little ethanol sensitive materials. You can get a flex-fuel kit for most modern cars for pretty cheap, and it usually just contains a couple of parts you need to replace.
Ethanol also reduces fuel economy so yes it does hurt the enviroment by introducing more co2 into our globally warmed atmosphere.
Not really. It reduces MPG since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline. It burns cleaner so there are less overall pollutants. As far as CO2 goes that depends on how the ethanol was produced to determine whether or not it's a gain or loss of CO2. Ethanol produces less CO2 when burnt, but ethanol from corn takes a lot of energy to make (tractors, electricity) so it omes out almost being a wash.
Insurance needs fear to sell.
No it doesn't. People buy insurance because MOST don't have enough funds to cover things like car crashes, unexpected serious illnesses, etc. . These things happen and the LOGICAL response is to be prepared for them. At worst, that could be considered cautious.
However here is a fear that is irrational Climate change the climate always changes, day to day , year to year, century to century.
Weather != Climate. Climate changes TYPICALLY happen over 100's to 1000's of years, sometimes even longer. And the impacts of those changes on the life forms existing on the planet depend on how string and how fast those changes happen.
The changes, as indicated by all the research, observations, and data we have show that the climate is changing, and rapidly (decadal scale). There is no irrational fear here. The science says A is going to happen, evidence shows A is happening, and that there are consequences for A happening. Groups that are interested about these consequences and what their effects will be such as the DoD, DoE, insurance companies, agribusiness, etc. are incorporating the science into future plans to prepare for it.
And the difficulty will be was the damages caused by climate change or were you in a flood zone anyway.
What your describing is called attribution, an it's pretty easy to filter out such basic cases. Attribution of weather event to climate change is more difficult, but that's another matter. As water levels rise, flood zones will increase (at least in coastal areas). Storm surges will become more dangerous and travel further inland.
That's just an example, but these are things city planners and others need to be aware of when making long range plans. Otherwise, when those 1 in a thousand year events start becoming one every ten years there's going to be a heavy bill to pay.
and fearful governments afraid of being sued are complicit in this. A recent example I have is a local council declaring a flood zone in an area that would only flood if sea levels rose 2-3 metres insurance companies without question simply rose all premiums in the area $3000 -$7000 if you wanted flood insurance.
You don't seem to understand coastal flood zones very well. Storm surges, even those not driven by hurricanes, can easily exceed 2 or 3 meters. Even coastal winds can drive waves that size depending on where you live. And if such events have been shown to be happening more frequently in your area due to a combination of increasing extreme events, ocean rise, coastal erosion, etc. then it only make sense.
It did have an effect as people in this area were generally concerned about climate change now many I spoke to have seen the money maker it really is
You're going to need more than emotional appeal to win an argument. You have to get some real hard data and show WHY you think the increase is unnecessary. How often does the area flood? How much value does the area have? What is the projected increase in flooding events as sea levels rise? What is the projected increase of conditions that would lead to probable flooding? Insurance companies use a lot of information to estimate risks and determine premiums. If you don't have a solid provable case you basically just whining that your premiums had to go up to cover the increasing risk due to a changing climate.
This shouldn't be a surprise to you, as scientist have been saying these types of things would likely happen 30 years ago.
I don't think it is that bad (outright fraud). It is just bias run rampant along with financial incentive to underestimate uncertainty combined with widespread failure of science education in statistics.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Financial incentive? Really? When someone says something like this it makes me seriously wonder what kind of math is being taught in school these days. Here you criticize the math capabilities of scientists and yet you seem to fail at comprehending orders of magnitude.
OK kids, you can do this with a few minutes and Google. Look up the budget allocations for climate science for our country. Go ahead. Now look up the profits of just one of the major fossil fuel companies. For extra credit, just look up the profits for one financial quarter of that company. OK kids, no which one is bigger? If you answered the fossil fuel company, you are correct! Now is it just a little bit bigger or a lot bigger? If you said a lot bigger, then you are correct again! Give yourself a gold star!
Climate scientists do what they because they like what they do and are concerned. If they wanted to really make bank, they would sell out their morals and hop on the fossil fuel train.
Fair enough, but nobody is very interested in local climate in the immediate vicinity of one weather station. The fact that a paper was written is evidence that the importance of these measurements is being overstated...
I know this is slashdot, but if you actually read the freakin' paper you wouldn't make arguments that make you sound like you have a serious reading comprehension problem. More than "one weather" station was involved in the research.
...What is satisfying is seeing someone actually included the error margin. The climate models never seem to...
Yeah, I can tell you run in scientific circles. Have you even read a scientific paper before or do you just like making crap up to make yourself sound knowledgeable? Ever single paper on climate results (or pretty much any science paper at all), including those on model construction, comes with error bars.
You're forgetting the bible. There is a lot of nasty stuff in the bible.
No. The gunman killed the kids. The gun and bullets were simply the tools used. Should all computers be banned because hackers use them to hack?
Oh come on now. Guns don't kill people. But they sure help. :P
Work for less pay? Does that include the outrageously exorbitant compensation CEOs and upper level management have, or just us plebs below them?
You're just now realizing we're screwed?
There's a 30 year lag from the introduction of additional CO2 to when it's full effects are felt. So you are correct, even stopping now we would still continue to reap the "benefits" of a warming planet for several decades.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark. When numerous species die off, farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species, coastal cities become inundated, and lots of people die then maybe something will be done about it. But don't get your hopes up.
Because IT stuff is easy. I mean, you just type some things and click a few buttons, right? That's not hard. Why do you need 100k a year to do that?
Because I know what to type and I know what buttons to press.
I know you're being sarcastic, but this same argument could be used for anything from subway operators to nuclear plant operators.
So, you came up with a model that accurately predicts the past?
No, that isn't how climate models are developed. They use known equations from various scientific branches, and build a reasonable simulation of climate processes with them. Then they use past observational data to kickstart the model and let it run from some point in the past to the present to see how well they modeled reality. The more accurate the data and the mathematical model, the better job it does.
That model is then initialized with a bunch of variations on current and future scenarios and run forward for some period of time (there are sometimes even thousands of variations). This is an ensemble. The results are then analyzed and used as a GUIDE.
Models are a tool for scientists. They are not the end-all be-all of scientific research.
What nonesense is that? The accuracy of a model can only be determined by testing it against reality, and not against the data it has been fitted to.
You fail to understand how climate models are developed. Climate models are not "fitted" to the data. They are COMPARED to the data. If a particular model result shows significant divergence from reality, then it is a problem with the theory. The model is not "tweaked" to make it replicate the past, otherwise it would fail whenever new components or new data was introduced (and they don't)
You seem to be largely ignorant of science and modelling. Again, models are the result of science, not the other way around. Models are tools.
You need new data to do that and I'm sorry to tell you that new annual data sets will arrive only at a pace of one per year.
The early computer climate models developed in the '70's and '80's ran ensembles to predict the direction of future climate 30 years out. They were remarkably accurate in their predictions, despite being very coarse and the low computational power available at the time.
Climate science is not some sort of independent branch of science that has no bearing on reality. Every aspect of climate science draws on long established theory from other branches, from chemistry to thermal dynamics. You seem to be implying that somehow, all of modern physics is a sham.
Meanwhile, shut up and look at the models you've made so far and be ashamed of the constant revisions in both directions
I'm not aware of any model that doesn't undergo constant revisions. Errors are found. Improvements are implemented. New data sets are available. New science is done. Every complex model is a reflection of the current state of the art of our understanding.
In any other branch of science coming up with the kind of models and inaccuracies that climate science comes up with, scientists would simply say .. well, sorry, we cannot model these processes with any degree of accuracy and be done with it.
But they can, and have. There's a ton of peer-reviewed science out there stating the case.
If you came up with a better model, well, good for you, but now you have to *prove* it is actually better than all the rest so far.
They do. That's how science works.
In comparison, climate change, here, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not going to get dramatically worse, if we don't do anything about it. For example, they generally forecast the loss of about as much land over the next century from rising water levels (assuming a one meter rise) as are lost each year from desertification due mostly to bad agricultural practices.
You're not thinking this through very well. Sea level rise magnifies events (storms, hurricanes, etc.) by increasing the surge dramatically. Imagine another 3 feet of water hitting NY on top of something like Sandy.
Also, sea level rise is only one factor. A larger issue is the rapid change in weather patterns. We're already seeing an increase in extreme events, including some we haven't seen before in particular areas, such as the arctic. This results in other changes like melting permafrost and severe coastal erosion.
And an even larger issue is climatic changes. For example, current projections show a marked decrease in precipitation over the grain belt. That is projected to happen within this century. That will have some significant consequences by itself, let alone other changes across the rest of the world.
You're also forgetting that according to paleoclimate studies, the rate of change we're seeing is happening incredibly fast. Changes even over the last century typically take hundreds to thousands of years. Other than super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts, we don't have a proxy to compare against to see how bad things could get (one of the reasons why scientists are running projections).
Climate change and it's impacts covers a very broad range of consequences. A fair number of those consequences we will be seeing before the end of our lifetimes.
So in summary, there is more value to nipping in the bud deliberately harmful human actions than there is with a slow moving human-induced natural change that just isn't that significant in the first place.
You are sadly misinformed. Read the IPCC or report or wait for the AR5 report. Or you can ignore the results and recommendations by the scientists and find out the hard way.
I wonder what the total IQ of the House Science Committee is?
Probably somewhere between 1 and Q
Do they call it a brain transplant?
Only if they use bullshit.
In the words of the Daily Show: "What he says makes sense. And if you don't think about it he makes even more sense."
Glenn Beck is about one thing and one thing only: Glenn Beck. He's not a moron. He's not stupid. He gets paid millions of dollars for spewing conspiracy laced nonsense across the airwaves. And his listeners love him for it.
Sure, any rational thinking person would listen to one show and say, "Wow, that guy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.". But then again, rational thinking people are not his target audience. He knows what he's doing, and I doubt he believes half of what he spews across the air.