Climate Panel Says To Prepare For Weird Weather 469
Layzej writes "Extreme weather, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave or the drought in the horn of Africa, will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in a report released today. Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes. Critics of the report note that 'Governments have in the past considerably weakened the language of IPCC summaries for policymakers,' and that the IPCC process tends to water down even the most obvious conclusions."
2020 (Score:3)
Re:2020 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Never mind about what we said about the hot weather, just get your tinfoil hats ready when solar magnetic decline and solar minimum freeze (y)our rears off in 2020..."
Seems to me that tinfoil hats would be better protection against all that warming that hasn't been happening. And you could fold it into little boats to float all your possessions when the sea level rises to... wait, what? Back to the level it was 3 year ago.
Re:2020 (Score:5, Informative)
Data from 1979 ..
Eye witness reports from the 40s and 19th century contradicts that the Arctic is thinning in any way different now compared to then. We even sent scientific expeditions to the arctic to investigate the unusual warming, more than a hundred years ago.
Then it froze right back.
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London. 20th November, 1817
“From an examination of the Greenland captains, it has been found that owing to some convulsions of nature , the sea was more open and more free from compact ice than in any former voyage they ever made: that several ships actually reached the eighty-fourth degree of latitude, in which no ice whatever was found; that for the first time for 400 years, vessels penetrated to the west coast of Greenland, and that they apprehended no obstacle to their even reaching the pole, if it had consisted with their duty to their employers to make the attempt.”
Greenland, the adjacent seas, and the North-west Passage to the Pacific Ocean: illustrated in a voyage to Davis's strait, during the summer of 1817 (Google eBook)
Does this evidence disagree with your conclusion?
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Can you please explain how ice that didn't exist would be thick?
(I can only assume you don't realize we're talking about sea ice)
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You do realize that we have no data on ice changes in the arctic from pretty much before 1970 I hope? The only thing we have, the only way to know whether something unusual has happened or not, are "anecdotes" from ... the Royal Society, ship captains etc.
I'm not sure you understand the scientific method. Observation is a key concept.
(There are some proxies we can use, and papers have recently been published. According to them it's normal for the arctic to have low extents of ice throughout history: http:// [www.ngu.no]
and... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:and... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but it won't balance out.
Canada, roughly the same land area as the US, becomes slightly more habitable as the US becomes less so. But they don't get any more light, so their food-growing seasons never get to be as good as in the US. Same situation applies to China and Russia.
Plus, you really don't want to find out what happens if that kind of volume of people needs to migrate, particularly when the lands in question belong to different countries. The China/Russia one is particularly exciting to think about. When (and sadly, not if at this point) China and Russia go to war, it is going to affect the whole world.
Re:and... (Score:5, Insightful)
When (and sadly, not if at this point) China and Russia go to war
How can you sit there and spew this FUD? What could possibly make you think that you're smart and knowledgeable enough to definitively predict such things?
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If they would goto war it would have more to do with minerals than population as Siberia has a lot of natural resources that a country hell bent on the growth on manufacturing need. There is also an argument that the peoples in Siberia share more in common with the Chinese than the more european Russians west of the Ural. Not to mention they both fought a little known skirmish in 1969 over their border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino [wikipedia.org]â"Soviet_border_conflict
However, if you had a Russian regime tha
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It won't balance out from our perspective for sure. Just like the climate didn't 'balance out' for the dinosaurs after the asteroid hit. Some other race will inherit the earth.
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We don't want to lose a lot of people. For one thing, some of the people lost might be ourselves or our families and loved ones. Even if not, mass human tragedy isn't desirable.
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No. The point is that weather will get weird. As the global climate warms, weather patterns will break out of their normal negative-feedback-enforced cycles. Freakish temperature streaks, extreme precipitation, drought, and irregular winds will make agriculture much more difficult and unreliable everywhere. For a fun preview of what we're in for, check out the events of 1315-22 in Europe (hint: it's commonly called "The Great Famine").
The best part is that even if other regions (for example, Canada) have wa
You've never been to Canada, have you? (Score:4, Informative)
Canada grows a ton of wheat. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba all have major wheat growing operations (other things too). Some of my cousins are indeed farmers up in Canada. Wheat isn't all that Canada grows, but it is a big crop there.
Re:You've never been to Canada, have you? (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in Canada. As you say, all of those areas are already highly productive. What I was referring to is new productivity as a result of climate change. Areas that might become warmer--and thus suitable for agriculture--are currently boreal forest. It would take decades of natural processes for that boreal forest soil to develop into anything that could support agriculture for more than a season or two. North of this is tundra, which might have a better soil profile, but doesn't have enough daylight for agriculture regardless of temperatures or precipitation.
Just one question... (Score:3)
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There's no way to know. What we consider "normal" weather is the product of negative-reinforcement systems. Once climate change breaks us out of those cycles, anything goes. Our ability to model weather isn't nearly sophisticated enough to predict it.
For those that dismiss these news as irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
You would do well to consider that flooded server rooms may have an adverse impact on the IT infrastructure.
Same can be said for production facilities. Take the recent example of Thailand floods causing an hard drive shortage [ibtimes.com] that is steadily driving prices up.
Adverse weather will only make things gradually more challenging, requiring more technical know-how and workarounds to deal with it.
Re:For those that dismiss these news as irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For those that dismiss these news as irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
All of those things are true but it's true that there was a record amount of rainfall as well.
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Re:For those that dismiss these news as irrelevant (Score:4, Informative)
Changes in precipitation with climate change [ucar.edu] [PDF] by Kevin Trenberth.
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Thailand floods are purely anthropogenic in nature -- a result of deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existing city planning, just like global warming.
FTFY.
Re:For those that dismiss these news as irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Past the tipping point (Score:5, Informative)
I think we've past the tipping point already. At the least, I don't think we can change our habits enough to prevent climate change at this point, so...
I think we need to start planning for the aftermath of all of this, and do as much as we can in preparation for those changes. Unfortunately I don't think we will, and all I can see is a lot of people needlessly suffering for it all.
Re:Past the tipping point (Score:5, Insightful)
James Lovelock, the grandfather of geoplanetary science, agrees with you. I'm not inclined to argue the point with him, since he has been right on every prediction so far and is the inventor of the best model we have of how planetary systems work.
My argument is the same one as it has always been - the top 2% of the population are Mensa-level, which means we've 140,000,000 geniuses planet-wide. That is more than adequate, provided they have the education and the resources, to prepare humanity for what is inevitable and to prevent what is inevitable from being any worse. That's not even including those who are brilliant in ways IQ cannot measure, so you might need to double or triple the brainpower that can be let loose on this.
You'd need to be willing to spend money. Over the next ten years, the US would need to double its debt just to educate its own. I did the calculation for that a while back on Slashdot for those interested in how I got that figure. However, it could be done. You just have to want to.
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I was in Mensa. Big whoop. There is no correlation with being in the top two and being right, nor with being a genius and being right, for that matter.
"Over the next ten years, the US would need to double its debt just to educate its own."
*FIFTEEN TRILLION* dollars on education? Up yours.
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Weird Weather (Score:5, Funny)
Publicity for Ubuntu 16.04 or around.
I live in the North-West of Scotland. (Score:5, Interesting)
We already have weird weather. It's the end of November and it's 15C outside (I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse od input parsing). It reached a deep low of about 8C earlier in the month. During the summer, the temperature varied between -2C and 26C in July.
Yesterday I was seeing wind speeds of up to 90mph in gusts and 60mph sustained, and today it is flat calm. In January we normally see sustained 120mph winds, but this year they were only about 90mph.
Although it's flat calm and warm and sunny now, in as little as ten minutes the weather could go to a hailstorm with high winds and the cloudbase at about treetop height, then clear up just as soon as it came.
Up here, this is all perfectly normal. It's just what it's like here.
"Weird weather", is it? Well, we'll see.
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Some parts of the world already have highly fluctuating weather. That's just how it is.
What would happen is that more parts of the world would get fluctuating weather, and those that already do would have it worse.
I have the answer folks, send me my prize. (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, here it is.
We engage the warp drive on the hemp production. We will suck every drop of carbon out of the atmosphere with it. Seriously, we have our number one oxygen scrubber growling like a weed. Once upon a time hemp grew like a weed. It was a damn weed and it would grow out of control. It's a pain in the ass if you want to grow corn crops. It makes great rope, in fact we enacted farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. Then we said...no..no more hemp.
It seems the cotton industry hated it. Here is a WEED that people go grab for fibers then that they could weave for themselves cloths and such. Coupled with corn farmers they lobbied it as an evil South of the border thing. And they did their best to eradicate it. It also turned out that the jazz and blues musicians were smoking it in all of those wrong kind of places to be seen at as a decent Christian sort. They were able to demonize it even more with their lobbyists. Preachers thundered on about it, etc.
But lets look at the facts of the matter. This plant has some amazing qualities to it aside from deer and rabbits wanting to eat it like it's a delicacy to them. The seeds of this are from what I understand can be distilled into a petroleum. Yes, I thought that as well. Petroleum? Seriously?
Petro is a hydrocarbon. Correct? What do we have floating about fucking up our atmosphere? Carbon? What thrives on this stuff in the air? Plants? How about a plant that will chew this stuff up and store that carbon in it's seeds as energy for it's babies. Imagine harvesting those seeds for that hydrocarbon? Then you have a very strong fiber resulting from the harvest as well. There are various grades of this fiber to work with. First being very long strong straight strands, then of course pulp fiber which can be pressed into parchment paper such as what the US Constitution is wrote on. Imagine the image quality of a high quality ink printer photo on a paper that ages like our Constitution. I can't get that at Office Max, can you? Let me know if you do, I want to print off pirate maps on some. Arrgh!
Here is the solution. You legalize and authorize hemp production in the US. It has to be licensed and monitored by the Ag department, not the DEA. Don't worry, stoners will not be growing weed in it or near it. They will cry if they do because it will be allowed to massively pollinate with Midwestern native hemp, which will drop the THC levels into the ditch weed category. Not to mention it will become seedy as FUCK. Everyone hates seedy pot. If you go to smoke pot and there is a seed in the pipe or the joint, BOOM! I have seen seeds blow up in a pot pipe someone was smoking and blow all the pot out of it and give them a face full of burning weed. It wasn't like a grenade, it just startles the living crap out of them when it happens. As a kid, I would get a seed, hollow out the tobacco of a cigarette, drop a big fat juicy seed in it, then repack it. We've all sabotaged a smoker like that before, right?
As I digress...
Those same "blow the fuck up in your face, so you better clean them out, NOOB" seeds are the ones that you run through a high pressure roller press and collect the oil. We also have to do this scientifically to appease the most staunch of skeptics. First, it has to be grown by using a strong composing, we can do this by processing a lot of our waste. We can let it process a trashy swampy sewer-ed field into clay, instead of devouring crop land. You just have to engineer the fields according with EPA standards for a land fill situation. It's called, get out the bulldozers time and do some serious earth moving.
We can do some genetic experimentation with this to tweak it to grow insanely big and fast. Plants are amazingly fun to mess with on a genetic level, we have been doing it for quite a time now. We used to call it "breeding". There are an amazing variety of this plant that we can cross breed with. Take for example there is a breed of it in italy that grows 6 inches I day, I would say couple that with so
Re:I have the answer folks, send me my prize. (Score:5, Interesting)
What would be better than hemp (at least, as a foundation) would be algae and bamboo.
I'm not anti-hemp, but let's look at some facts. Fact, bamboo can be grown on crappy, dirty water. Fact, there's a strain of bamboo for almost every climate. Fact, bamboo is fast-growing and has more mass than hemp where you can grow the right varieties; one planting of many types is said to essentially fix all the excess carbon floating about above that land area. We can use it for many purposes, just like hemp. It's far more useful as a building material, which is very handy because in order to actually sequester carbon with plants you have to cut them down and bury them, or build stuff out of them. Allowing it to compost itself back to the land causes it to release most of its carbon back into the atmosphere which does not help us at all.
As for algae, we have enough unused desert land in the USA to replace all of our fuel oil consumption with biodiesel from algae using technology proven at Sandia NREL in the 1980s. That technology was believed to be profitable by the time diesel fuel hit $3/gallon. This is of course dependent on getting permits from the BLM to grow the algae there. You can get permits for coal or oil but not for solar, so algae is probably out of the question as well unless we make some fundamental changes in our society. I could see Africa getting on board if they weren't being fucked by everyone in turn.
Re:I have the answer folks, send me my prize. (Score:5, Funny)
I think you misunderstand. The GP doesn't care about that. The GP wants to get high.
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Wants to get high, justifies possible aid to global climate change.
Quite similar to a person with a vested interest in ethanol once told me. Ethanol is carbon negative! Take the corn kernels and make ethanol. What do you do with the cob and stalks? He didn't know, but you could do something with them as they are made from carbon pulled from the air. There you go, more carbon stored than burned. Therefore, make and burn more ethanol by building plants made by the company he works for.
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But the American desert is not lifeless (far from it; I live in the desert and I've never seen a place, outside of a swamp, so filled to overflowing with both plants and critters -- all of them spiney and hungry!) What you propose is destroying large swaths of that ecosystem -- which is already rather fragile. How do you justify that? How is this any different from destroying a more-conventionally "pretty" ecosystem, like a forest, for the same purpose?
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Go ahead an enjoy smoking your bamboo.
You first. No, really, I must insist.
Climate vs. Economy (Score:3)
1) accept that we will have climage change and see where we go.
2) Do something that forces ALL NATIONS TO CHANGE AT THE SAME TIME.
Now, America is NOT going to change unless we see that nations like China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to change. China has already indicated that they will not change. They keep saying that this is about output / person, which is a false measure. So, how to change this? HAVE NATIONS PUT A TAX ON ALL MANUFACTURED GOODS PREDICATED ON CO2 FROM WHERE IT (and parts) CAME from. That tax should rise steadily to give nations time to adjust. OCO2 is about to go up. This sat measures CO2 in the atmosphere. This will give us a true measure of CO2 that is flowing in/out from a nation. That will make it possible for us to have true values to work with. That will almost certainly mean that many nations and even unexpected areas are going to show up as emitting far far more than what they expected. By doing a tax on ALL goods, we will see nations change quickly. The reason is because it is economically better to do that, then not.
The one issue is how to apply it. Many will argue for CO2 per capita. That is one of the WORST measures going. The reason is that nations will cheat in their reporting. In addition, it rewards nations that have not controlled their population. In addition, CO2 output is NOT correlated with populations. Far from it.
I have argued that the fairest and sanest would be per sq km. The reason is that the size of land is fixed and can be seen from space. Likewise Ag is a major CO2 emitter. But probably the worst output is a correlation with economic output. Most of man's CO2 output is far more related to economics.
As such, it makes sense to look at it in terms of CO2 per $ of GPD or CO2 per land rather than per capitia.
Best Job Ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Prepare for weird weather?! Seriously?
Say "prepare for weird weather" at the beginning of every year for all eternity and you'd be spot-on.
Climate is always changing. Weather is always weird. We don't need a panel to tell us the obvious. Please go do something useful instead.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The planet warming WILL result in regions cooling because it disrupts the heat transfer mechanisms. Central Europe cooling would likely be disruption to the trade winds and the Atlantic Conveyer. It is extremely naive to assume that global warming equates to local warming and the fact that your environment is the coldest in 50 years really should have tipped you off.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact increased heat in the system has several counter intuitive effects. This is because increased heat vaporizes more water increasing the length and severity of storm events. More Cat 5 hurricanes, more snow, more floods. Conversely it means frequent and unpredictable changes in weather patterns. This has to do with greater swings in climate, increased frequency of swings. This is what thermodynamicists refer to as a system in purturbation.
Even the researchers that had objected to global warming now acknowledges its happening. The evidence in incontrovertible. They still argue to the cause, but considering that the year 2011 saw unprecedented production of greenhouse gases (far exceeding even the worst case scenarios), it should now be clear to anyone who doesn't have a personal axe to grind that the climate is in the process of extraordinary change, and that the conditions we rely on to feed 7 billion people are about to get very dicey. It is now time to begin global projects designed to move humanity off of fossil fuel. High altitude wind power, space based solar power, small thorium base reactors, high performance hydrogen fuel cells and advanced power storage technologies could easily cover our need until we perfect fusion. The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
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Well, maybe if we wouldn't live on this planet with 7 billion people in the first place then all this climate mumbo jumbo wouldn't matter as much. But hey, it's so much better to limit us all than keep the population in check!
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Would help if there weren't so many left wing nut jobs (read: Republicans) telling the world that abortion is murder, and religious fools (read: The Vatican) that contraception is a sin.
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The abortion is murder message isn't so bad but it needs to be accompanied by "here's how to prevent it" by someone with condoms in one hand, iud's in the other hand and in the gripping hand, the pill.
Lets stop abortion by stopping unwanted pregnancy.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Insightful)
A destroyed climate is as bad for a hundred people as it is for 7 billion, so it would matter exactly as much.
Limit you all? LIMIT? Necessity is the mother of invention. If you feel limited by a need to invent, you're on the wrong site. Besides, what are these "limits" of which you speak? You can reduce pollution by increasing efficiency. Increased efficiency means you get more out for the same amount in (since you can't violate the law of conservation of matter and energy and therefore what would be pollutants are now something useful instead). That sounds like a recipe for profits, not limits.
Moving off coal and adopting nuclear fission (for now, fusion later) doesn't LIMIT you. You get much more power on the grid for less fuel and much less pollution. The miners won't be getting lung cancer or blown up in methane explosions, so saving lives and cutting medical (and rescue) expenses, all at the same time. Those freed-up people, if educated and retrained, could be a marvelous resource to tap into. The mistake made by many shifts in industry is to neglect the fact that humans are a powerful and valuable resource. Ignoring them limits your scope for imagination, exploration and development.
And let's examine that for a moment. Here's thousands, if not tens of thousands, of opportunities to try new things, explore new ideas and grow. Who but a fool would call that a limit?
Use the potential that change brings! Ignoring it and wasting it won't stop it, but it will limit what good can come from it.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Interesting)
With seven billion people on the planet, and rapidly rising standards of living in China and other parts of Asia, with coal increasingly augmenting the petroleum plateau, I'd be shocked if every year didn't set a new record for CO2 emissions.
What would be unprecedented here is a global consensus among rich and poor, east and west in preventing business as usual from raising the bar on CO2 emissions every year for the next half century--which is exactly what would have happened had the earth's CO2 levels not been precisely balanced at a precarious tipping point as science presently tells the story. If we pull this off, we'll be manufacturing a political consensus out of whole cloth such as never before witnessed on this blue marble.
On another note, I don't get this beautification of scientific consensus as the second coming of fast food culture: science is, and always was, a slow food movement. It takes decades or centuries to reach secure conclusions concerning systems as complex as the earth's climate. I think this is a lot like a doctor who discovers a new disease model, then immediately proposes an extremely radical treatment of unknown severity and consequence.
Via Wikipedia:
Amputated at the thigh IIRC by another doctor who shows and takes responsibility. In the long run, these interventions become routine, and the consequences become understood and mitigated.
Is there any evidence that we can fundamentally shift the global economy away from fossil fuels on a radical program without incurring large and unknowable risks to geopolitical stability in doing so?
The paint is still wet on climate science. Be careful what you wish for. And don't write me off as a club foot surgery denier. The old day-glo Wired was my personal hot tub: I'm a card-carrying techno-optimist. Politically, however, I'm extremely wary about any combination of alacrity with wet paint. Apollo 13 was pretty much the historical high water mark on smooth sailing amidst a crash program instigated by handshakes among our political overlords.
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I'm not so godawful impressed with the "geopolitical stability" at the moment, so maybe it's worth a shot, huh?
If the next few years sees the development of low-cost standalone energy systems, something like super-efficient solar systems or portable cold-fusion reactors or some such, where houses and businesses
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It isn't that Foolish Human Scientists are making it up as the go along, as
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Awesome. Totally awesome. You made me spit coffee. :)))))
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If you keep having "bloody cold" winters for the next 10 years then you might have something. Otherwise you're just experiencing natural variation.
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I'm in central Europe ... There's going to be snow on Christmas
Unless this "Europe" you are referring to is some village in Africa, what's so strange about that? Even in the warmest parts of Europe, in the southern part of that continent, it occasionally snows on Christmas.
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Years ago I climbed mount Bogong in February and there was a patch of snow close to the summit.
Re:Warms?! (Score:4, Funny)
You're sure it wasn't just a blanket of dead moths? Those damn things pile up everywhere.
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Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl. Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots. But this doesn't provide evidence tha
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Aww yes, nothing is happening and we can't do anything about it if it was happening. Same old bullshit story (or non story).
Maybe you think weather patterns are not leading indicators of climate change, but they are the canary in the coal mine as harbingers of what's to come.
Second point-no need to do anything about emissions cause the economy is just too damn scary. Here's a newsflash that you might not have completely thought through-when is it going to become too expensive to rebuild the communities that get hit by tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme snowfall, etc? Think about it, billions to rebuild entire towns/cities in this economy. Soon we will decide whether if your home is worthwhile to rebuild or just creat a greenspace.
P.S. I live in New Orleans and know of the expense and toil of what I speak.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Insightful)
People die. We are not immortal. But to claim that we don't have to worry about a poison gas cloud coming our way because people die anyway is ludicrous. The argument that X happens naturally, therefore we need not be concerned about X, only appeals to those who want to dismiss a topic they find uncomfortable to deal with.
Re:Warms?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl.
No climate isn't static and no scientist claims it is. However, WE have adapted to a particular climate and expect it to stay within norms to survive. Changes in the climate can have devastating effects to regions not prepared to deal with them.
As to your examples, a dry spell isn't climate change. The dust bowl wasn't climate change either. Those were both weather events.
Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots.
Your claim of CO2 lagging warming is nonsense and has been thoroughly debunked. Also, plants do no make CO2, they consume it. Conditions millions of years ago have jack to do with our current climate. Different albedos, land mass configurations, etc. .
But this doesn't provide evidence that CO2 increases warmth, it provide evidence that CO2 correlates with decreasing warmth.
Really? And what is your scientific research backing up such a ridiculous claim? It seems all the peer-reviewed science says the exact opposite. Let me guess, you're a conspiracy nut, right?
Still, no one can predict climate in the best of times, much less now.
Of course, since you're clearly an expert on the subject. Climate is much easier to predict than weather.
Yet, sometimes the climate does very unfriendly things.
Yes it does, usually over 100's or 1000's of years which is usually enough time for adaptation. Sudden changes have had some rather nasty side effects in the past. The changes we are seeing now are happening with a lifetime or two. At best, that should raise some concern. It wouldn't take much change to render the US into a nation full of starving people for example. Shift the jet stream north and suddenly the nations breadbasket turns into a desert.
So it's the perfect bogy-man to point at if you want to scare money out of people, or distract them.
You're confusing terrorism and climate science. Terrorism is an ill-defined nebulous threat with about as much real threat as you being struck by a bolt of lightning on any given day. Climate science is a well researched topics that has made many verifiable predictions and has a huge amount of data and research backing it up.
Having said that, yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions. And the good news is, we will -- quite naturally -- as we stop burning petroleum. And we will stop, because it's hard to get, appears to be running out, and we have to negotiate with crazy people to get enough, and alternate sources make more sense on many levels, and we'll be reducing our power consumption by increasing efficiency, a good example being by wide adoption of electric vehicles, which we'll have in great numbers very shortly -- VERY shortly if recent battery tech announcements (1 [cnet.com],2 [ieee.org]) pan out. What we don't need to to is torque the economy (even further) out of shape to deal with an emergency that isn't here and which so far, no one has shown decisively to be incoming.
The point is that if we keep burning fossil fuels until they get too expensive to use we will just make the situation worse. It's not just oil. It's also coal, natural gas, and any other carbon based fuel source that isn't carbon neutral. None of these are going away any time soon.
But clearly, no amount of scientific research will convince you otherwise, so we'll just wait and see what happens over the next decade or so.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I ran the numbers on the Tesla roadster, a Tesla powered by 100% coal-derived electricity would be responsible for half the CO2 of a gasoline-powered car getting 30mpg. So, no, battery powered electric cars won't increase CO2 emissions drastically.
Re:Warms?! (Score:5, Informative)
And even if it does break even, it is easier to capture the CO2 at the coal plant than it is at the tailpipe.
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No. It means it uses less than 1/3rd the power. First, it's way more efficient. So for the same miles traveled, the EV uses less power, period. What that 1/3 range means is that batteries don't store as much energy per cubic foot as gasoline or diesel fuel does, that's all. And that is probably about to change anyway [suntimes.com].
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I have yet to see anyone propose a standard that actually doesn't use more electricity(which comes from coal) to create a cleaner future.
Everywhere else, people are moving towards electricity for a cleaner future.
There are plenty of ways of generating clean electricity: nuclear, wind, tidal, biomass, hydro, solar ... even, if they get the budgets right,
"clean" coal with carbon capture (from what i've seen, I think the tech. works, but not the finances).
Secondly, even with mainline coal-powered generation, greater generation efficiency can mean that coal-powered electrical vehicles
create less co2/km than gasoline.
Re:Warms?! (Score:4)
But you're wrong. Most electrics will recharge at night, when most of the grid's capacity is wasted. We don't need new power plants at all. If we need anything, it'll be heavier wiring in some places, that's all, because residential areas that pull power like industrial areas aren't really part of the current design.
No, they won't. For one thing, the power EV's use is much more efficiently created by power plant turbines than with individual engines. This means that considerably less fuel is burned -- even taking into account line and charging losses -- to run electric vehicles than gasoline or diesel vehicles. For another, an EV only makes CO2 while the centralized power plant does. Switch the power plant -- a much easier proposition than changing all the cars yet again -- and instantly, all those EVs become less, or zero, polluters. Put a petrol powered vehicle on the road, it'll make pollutants until the day it is taken off the road permanently.
First, your facts are wrong, which is why you haven't caught on yet. Read a little more - or just ask questions, I'll help -- and you'll see. Second, while some of the electricity comes from coal, the thing is, if you have a petrol burning vehicle, it will *always* make CO2 and other pollutants. If you have an electric vehicle, and let's say it's fed by a coal plant, then the polluting, radiation-emitting coal plant can be replaced with something else and instantly, all those electric vehicles now change how they contribute to pollutants in a very desirable fashion. This is why it makes sense to convert to electric no matter *what* kind of plant your region is actually using (and it's rarely simple as "we're on coal", as power is shared and bought back and forth all the time.)
Yes, the uninformed and statistically unskilled are unnecessarily scared of nuclear. That is one of our more serious problems. Very hard to fix with the hysteria that is extant. If they understood that coal plants put out more radiation than nuclear plants do, and coal mines kill more people than nuclear plant accidents do, and coal mining does more environmental damage than uranium mining (not to mention thorium-based designs), and that today's nuclear designs are not those used at Chernobyl, and that the placing nuclear power plants on earthquake prone spots (like Japan) where Tsunamis can get at them (like Japan) are not good design practices, not to mention a few other basic, but important ideas... they might straighten out. Getting that info to them in a form they can understand... very tough. Plus, there are people who just love a fuckarow; they love to scream about things that make other people's eyes go wide, and giving up a prized preconception like "nuclear is bad and scary" is hard for some.
Solar can be stored. There is pumped storage [wikipedia.org] at numerous scales (pumped storage can store any type of energy, not just solar, btw, as can most storage techniques), molten salt, flywheels, and even batteries (though the latter... ugh.) There's even a plan for using the anticipated at-home EV charging stations as distributed storage - load 'em up with any excess, feed back to the grid when convenient. Me, I'm a huge fan of pumped storage. Environmentally
Climate change ... is nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody makes the obvious point.
Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes.
Great. And how is this different from before ? My grandfather left north holland because it became too cold. Before that I'm told that a few dambreaks (presumably caused either by storms, rising sea level, or in the worst case incompetence) cause my family to leave a place between Amsterdam and Zeeland. That's just the last 200 years, maybe less (I only have generations to go on, not years. And there sure were a lot of dambreaks in the 19th century).
This is not an exception. Just read this : http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/06/20-abandoned-cities-and-towns/ [weburbanist.com].
That's again just the last century (and not all climate related, some are though). But going further back there's plenty of stuff. 2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest, filled with civilized black people (not arabs, who since exterminated them) who at one point dared attack Rome, and there was serious concern that campaign might succeed (and it did manage to cast aside 4 Roman legions, 3 in less time than it took the senate to notice their legions were gone, never mind decide what to do about it. They didn't do anything about it). The only reason there are Europeans in Europe is climate change in Eastern Asia. This is not news.
Where do we get the weird idea that climate was constant before today ? Where do we get the massive egocentric idea that it will start staying constant for us ? Gaia is a fickle godess that constantly slays things from houses, to cities, to entire states.
I am not saying that "there isn't something going on", but I do remember being taught how Darwinism categorizes species : adapt ... or die.
The whole strategy that seems to be pushed implicitly here seems to me a strategy that falls squarely in the latter category. Trying to keep things constant is not just a losing strategy, it's the way to extinction.
Re:Climate change ... is nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest ...
Not even close. From the Wikipedia article on the Sahara [wikipedia.org]:
The modern Sahara, though, is not lush in vegetation, except in the Nile Valley, at a few oases, and in the northern highlands, where Mediterranean plants such as the olive tree are found to grow. The region has been this way since about 4200 years ago.
Before that it was mostly savannah, not forest.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, right. There is little rain there because that's where the downward branch of the Hadley Cells [wikipedia.org] occurs.
Re:Climate change ... is nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)
Actual science says Sahara is greening: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html [nationalgeographic.com]
Attribution (Score:3)
When heatwave deaths are your fault, it is time to take corrective action.
Also, you are incorrect that trying to keep things steady is the way to extinction. This is some Frank Herbert meme but it has no basis. Beavers keep pond water levels constant and do just fine.
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
I totally agree! A bunch of scientists were wrong once. Sure, they got more data and reevaluated their models to be more accurate, but since they were wrong once there's no good reason to ever listen to them!
Re:So (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same IPCC that said we wouldn't have any glaciers by 2010, or icesheets, or that the northwest passage would be open to traffic(never mind it's been open to traffic since it was first charted). Or that there would never be snow again on various mountains, and so on and so forth. Or that we'd all be dead what was it this year? Or is it next year? I can never keep it straight with all these doomsday predictions from all these environmental groups, and government backed organizations.
Reading fail. The IPCC never said we wouldn't have glaciers or ice sheets by 2010. I'd be willing to put my whole retirement savings up to bet you can't back that statement up (and I'm 59 years old so I have some). I wouldn't call requiring a heavy duty ice breaker to get through the northwest passage in less than a couple of years "open to traffic".
Guys like you never examine the projected time frames on IPCC (and other climate scientists) statements very carefully. You think everything's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years and if it's longer than that you don't think it's worth worrying about.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember all the headlines about New York city would be buried under ice as part of the new ice age to be here by the year 2000.
[citation needed]
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
Not really the same thing. The global cooling hypothesis was only in a couple of papers and, unlike global warming, never received wide scientific support. It was however widely (and inaccurately) reported in the popular media.
You can read about it on (where else) wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling [wikipedia.org]
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We don't have a big problem with acid rain any more because of these warnings and following drastic tightening of emission regulations for power plants and other large scale emitters.
The hope is that these worst-case predictions and scenarios for the climate change lead to the required actions to limit further C02 emissions best case or at least prepare to mitigate the effects on things like food and water supply, flooding and storms.
Re:So (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wanna bet!
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes it's entertaining to read you guys who don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
My thought after reading was... "Wonder what the poster does for a living?" ...and I'm sure you know why. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, I doubt it's astronomy or geology.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:In spite of the data? (Score:4, Informative)
And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise.
Re:In spite of the data? (Score:4, Interesting)
For England, most of the heat input is via the ocean currents. The oceans are extremely large and it takes a lot of heat to make any significant difference in temperature. England will notice changes in rainfall - as indeed it has - long before any other effect becomes noticeable. The delay resulting from the ocean will mask temperature changes in Britain up until the Atlantic Conveyer fails entirely. THEN, temperatures will drop somewhere between 20'F and 40'F.yes, drop. Global temperature refers to the mean temperature of the entire planet, deserts and all. It is NOT an addition you can just make to everything. It is an average. If Billy as a car and Mandy has a car, then Grim gives Mandy Billy's car pus one more, the average number of cars has gone up even though Billy is now sulking in a corner.
Re: (Score:3)
Your "basic logic" has missed the part where being unable to formulate a trend for a 10 year period != having no access to the hundreds (ranging to millions, for some measures) of years of data that we have.
The GPs point was that while we may may need more than 10 years of data, we do have more than 10 years and we can draw trends from them.
Your lack of logic is unfortunate (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Global warming is encompassed in climate change, as is weird weather. You can disbelieve all you want but the climate doesn't care.
Corollary (Score:3)
Yes, very well said. Also, the corollary: You can believe all you want but the climate doesn't care.
Re: (Score:2)
By "fewer" you mean "more". I take it you're on good terms with the Red Queen.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
First it was "Global Warming", then when it became obvious that wasn't happening it was "Climate Change".
No.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=global+warming%2Cclimate+change&year_start=1970&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=3 [googlelabs.com]
Click the little linky thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I would wager that this is affected more by a greater number of people building houses in severe weather areas than an increase in the number and severity of the weather events. Yes, changes in weather will make a change here, but the number of "targets" in a given area has changed much more rapidly than the weather(climate) changes.
I find it hilarious that the press seems to focus on "
Re:I can see the weirdness (Score:5, Informative)
Your memory is too short, grasshopper: In August of 1955, hurricane Dianne [blish.org] dumped almost double the peak amount of rain (24 inches) on your region as compared to hurricane Irene [lmgtfy.com], and the consequences were likewise notable. And no-one, not even the truest climate change believers, are blaming Hurricane Dianne on CO2. Every once in a while, it is normal for a hurricane to do exactly that -- drop a bunch of water on the NY/PA region. It doesn't mean that we're experiencing climate change. It just means a hurricane followed an inconvenient track, while doing exactly what hurricanes always do. Again.
Re: (Score:3)
It will also lead to additional cooling. This is also an expected result. It's a feedback loop. One of many.
Re: (Score:2)
... but it hasn't happened. A bunch of models predict it will happen, but there's no data yet to show that the models are correct.
You do know how the scientific method works, I hope?
http://policlimate.com/tropical/ [policlimate.com]
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think you can make much of a case that it has been significantly warmer than it is now since the end of the Eemian interglacial around 115,000 years ago.
Re: (Score:3)
The great thing about prophecies like that is that they're vague enough to apply to any period of unusual weather you want them to.
The line about wars and rumors of wars always makes me snort. History of civilization right there.
Sorry to break it to you, but your holy books have no more predictive power than the horoscope column in a newspaper.