Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[OMGturt1es]

What risk?

No risk?

There aren't many times in the Earth's history when the carbon cycle was altered at rates anywhere near current rates. Mass extinctions occurred when changes occurred an order of magnitude less quickly.

Any major, relatively fast change in environment is risky. Critters evolve for specific environments. If environmental changes out-pace evolution, selection acts upon species, fauna and/or flora.

Reminder: Our species is just some furless, clawless gut bag. Our only real edge on nature is our ability to predict and exploit our environments. If we can't manage to recognize and act upon the clear risks from CO2 emissions, it would seem we've over-estimated our prediction and exploitation skills.

I'm not optimistic.

 

[OMGturt1es]

Walls are built...

I work for an engineering firm. I study levees.

Building adequate flood protection to mitigate the impacts of a single meter of sea level rise will be tremendously expensive. Billions and billions of dollars. Two meters? Three? Unimaginable. Improving inland levees to deal with future 100-year floods will cost even more, because there are countless miles of these levees. And they're already in bad shape. And hazards will only increase. Improvements will only be cost effective in highly developed urban areas, and they will be holding back even more water, so when levees fail, it will be beyond devastating. And they will fail. And we'll need to improve flood protection measures in areas that previously didn't need flood protection, because storms are dumping more and more water. How many floods this summer were caused by insane downpours that overwhelmed drainage systems? Get used to it. We're stacking the deck against ourselves. Land will have to be abandoned because improvements will not be economically feasible.

Billions and billions and billions of dollars. Easily. Levees and associated flood protection infrastructure alone make the case.

 

[Pixel42]

Yah, it's Arnie, but he said it, and he's huge. But he had to hear it from somewhere right? (it's admittedly hard to find specific quotes, most of what you can find on the internet is from the big players, Cheney, Bush, Gore)

This is the general sentiment that's permeating through society

Funny, because the polls I've seen suggest that, thanks to the lies of the deniers, society's attitude is mostly that it's nothing to be concerned about, let alone take any action to prevent.

because alarmists start talking about catastrophe and flooding of biblical proportions.

If nothing is done these are (eventually) very likely scenarios. It's only alarmist if it's not true.

Incidentally you do understand that when, say, the IPCC etimate the range of warming likely to occur by the end of the century they are not implying that it will stop dead in the year 2100? There's plenty more warming to come after that.

There's a sense of reckless abandonment when the alarmists starting talking.

The sense I get from the scientists and environmentalists who have a good understanding of the science is more one of hopelessness and despair.

I still feel the most danger is coming from these groups, and not what you would call "deniers".

I am genuinely mystified as to what danger you think these groups pose. In the highly unlikely event that action is taken in line with what they are urging, any short term harm will almost certainly be outweighed by longer term benefits (and not just in the form of reduced warming). Whilst the damage done by deniers in preventing action will have consequences which will be felt for centuries.

 

[Warmer1]

"We can adapt faster than the climate can change."

"I don't see how we have any choice but to continue using the cheapest energy possible and wait to see what happens."

Uh huh?

 

[Warmer1]

Perhaps 3bodyproblem you could share with us how it is that you are not bothered much by the various species dying off? I could never share your lack of concern for the loss of life of the animals on this earth.

"Only in people's minds. We can adapt faster than the climate can change. That means everything.
Unfortunately some animals can't and that's sad. I'm more concerned about humans however than polar bears or ice bergs."

From
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68E5YO20100915?pageNumber=1

"So far, 2010 is tied for the warmest year on record, and Arctic sea ice reached its third-lowest level, prompting thousands of walruses to haul themselves out of ice-starved waters, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday."

"In the Arctic, sea ice cover appeared to hit its lowest point for the year on September 10, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center."

"Under normal conditions, walruses eat bottom-dwelling creatures in shallow water on the continental shelf, using sea ice as fishing platforms. Recently, sea ice has retreated past the shelf into areas of deep water, where walruses can't fish."

So I take it from your post that the walruses may die off and that's sad but "I'm more concerned about humans however than polar bears or ice bergs."

Can you share with us why yoou think that humans are so much more important that other species?

 

[Dancing David]

Um, it's very simple. People move, land is fertilized and irrigated even transported if necessary.

Maybe you don't understand a different point, other than the fact that certain islands are going to disappear. And there is no place for the people in Bangladesh to go to.

There is not going to be more arable land, if the climate continues to warm. The land in northern Alberta or Ontario will have a very small increase in growing season. The summer temperatures will rise but the growing season will extend only briefly, so there will be a small increase in the time available to crop wheat but that is about it. there will not be more land to crop maize or soybeans.

the second thing is that weather models are unknown, so here in Illinois the biggest impact that most models agree on, is that there would be a large increase in the summer highs in many models about 10 degrees F, which could produce rather severe stress in crops without an increase in the average rainfall.

The biggest question is what would the rain patterns be like, with current rain, more crops stress, with less rain crop death, with more rain (something many of the models do not predict), less crop stress.

the strangest thing, little change in winter temps, so Chicago is often predicted to have the 10 degree rise in summer temps but less than a five degree rise in winter temps.

And the third largest issue is that these changes will keep happening a global rise over a century is one issue, continued rise over two centuries and further is much more of a problem.

the biggest thing that supports AGW in my mind is the Milkanovitch cycles, we are not in a warming series for that.

 

[Furcifer]

No risk?

There aren't many times in the Earth's history when the carbon cycle was altered at rates anywhere near current rates. Mass extinctions occurred when changes occurred an order of magnitude less quickly.

Any major, relatively fast change in environment is risky. Critters evolve for specific environments. If environmental changes out-pace evolution, selection acts upon species, fauna and/or flora.

Reminder: Our species is just some furless, clawless gut bag. Our only real edge on nature is our ability to predict and exploit our environments. If we can't manage to recognize and act upon the clear risks from CO2 emissions, it would seem we've over-estimated our prediction and exploitation skills.

I'm not optimistic.

Isn't this the exact same argument the anti-nuke movement used? You know, the ones that essentially got us into this mess in the first place. (just my opinion, I honestly think if we had embraced nuclear we'd be close to carbon free by now)

It's the same "Look what we've created, we're going to destroy the world, I'm not very optimistic of the outcome" kinda alarmist reaction.

Prophesying the end of the World is so...boring. We'll adapt and move on. Don't worry so much.

 

[Furcifer]

I work for an engineering firm. I study levees.

Building adequate flood protection to mitigate the impacts of a single meter of sea level rise will be tremendously expensive. Billions and billions of dollars. Two meters? Three? Unimaginable. Improving inland levees to deal with future 100-year floods will cost even more, because there are countless miles of these levees. And they're already in bad shape. And hazards will only increase. Improvements will only be cost effective in highly developed urban areas, and they will be holding back even more water, so when levees fail, it will be beyond devastating. And they will fail. And we'll need to improve flood protection measures in areas that previously didn't need flood protection, because storms are dumping more and more water. How many floods this summer were caused by insane downpours that overwhelmed drainage systems? Get used to it. We're stacking the deck against ourselves. Land will have to be abandoned because improvements will not be economically feasible.

Billions and billions and billions of dollars. Easily. Levees and associated flood protection infrastructure alone make the case.

I don't expect it will be cheap. But neither is going to zero carbon. Thankfully it will be spread out over 100 years. It's a ridiculously simple task with little urgency, if it needs to be done it will.

You're just ahead of your time

 

[Furcifer]

Funny, because the polls I've seen suggest that, thanks to the lies of the deniers, society's attitude is mostly that it's nothing to be concerned about, let alone take any action to prevent.

That's because there is nothing to be concerned about. And there is plenty of "action". You should see the turbines popping up all over the place. Solar panels, lights, green schools. It's crazy how much action there is. It's just that alarmism causes blindness.

I am genuinely mystified as to what danger you think these groups pose.

Eco-terrorism. It's already happened in China, companies threatening to release GH gases unless they get their carbon credits. The cons are already starting. Fraud. Panic.
Bad stuff.

 

[Furcifer]

Perhaps 3bodyproblem you could share with us how it is that you are not bothered much by the various species dying off? I could never share your lack of concern for the loss of life of the animals on this earth.

I got over that when I started eating meat again. With what's happening in Brazil you can't even eat tofu without being an accomplice to the dying off of species. Enough with the top predator guilt trip, we won. Yeah humans!

At some point you have to grow up an realize humans evolved and now we're responsible for the death of many species just by our being here. In terms of the Universe we're just the blink of an eye. I'm comfortable in knowing that we'll probably kill ourselves off and in another billion years some other animal will evolve and be in the same position pondering the same questions. Such is life.

"So far, 2010 is tied for the warmest year on record, and Arctic sea ice reached its third-lowest level, prompting thousands of walruses to haul themselves out of ice-starved waters, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday."

Tied? Really? I doubt it. The measurements are fairly precise, so the chances of it being tied are slim. Looks like the beginning of a new species of skinny walruses!

Can you share with us why yoou think that humans are so much more important that other species?

lol, seriously? Come on. Are you from PETA? When do we start eating the babies Mr. Swift?

Humans kill animals to survive. We're not more important, we're just in the position to do so. It sucks, but that's how it goes.

 

[Furcifer]

Then intelligence offers no long term evolutionary advantage. If we can only act upon what we feel and not upon what we know, then intellection is a mere distraction to occupy us when we are not fighting, feeding or procreating. The perception you are pushing, is the one that fosters the perspective you fear.

While insightful, I don't see how this relates to the deliberate misrepresentation created when people measure climate change on the Earth's time scale?

Measuring anything we do against the background of the Earth's time scale will be anomalous.

 

[Furcifer]

Maybe you don't understand a different point, other than the fact that certain islands are going to disappear. And there is no place for the people in Bangladesh to go to.

Wha? Even if the poles melted entirely there will be places for people to go. Water World was fiction, not fact.

There is not going to be more arable land, if the climate continues to warm.

That's not what the IPCC says.

there will not be more land to crop maize or soybeans.

Yes there will.

The biggest question is what would the rain patterns be like, with current rain, more crops stress, with less rain crop death, with more rain (something many of the models do not predict), less crop stress.

If it even matters. The IPCC predictions don't account for changes to the way things are grown. Land can be put under glass, irrigation networks etc. etc.

And the third largest issue is that these changes will keep happening a global rise over a century is one issue, continued rise over two centuries and further is much more of a problem.

I get the distinct impression you imagine everything staying the same way it is right now, just warmer. I can't imagine what society will look like 200 years from now. What I can tell you is people live quite comfortably right now in climates that differ by 10 degrees on average. So the climate in Chicago will be more like it is in Arizona today, big deal. This is the worst case scenario.

I find it much more likely that within 100 years we'll have the technology to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.

I find it much, much more likely that in 200 years people will be worried about too much CO2 being removed from the atmosphere and converted into fuel or fertilizer that people will be worried about Global Cooling.

These doomsday predictions never work out. They're just used to scare people into submission.

While relying on future technology to solve future problems is foolish, so is completely ignoring the probability of their invention. If the Wright brothers could figure out flight 100 years ago, removing CO2 from the atmosphere shouldn't be that difficult. Nanotechnology is probably the the solution, but biotechnology looks promising as well.

 

[Blue Mountain]

While insightful, I don't see how this relates to the deliberate misrepresentation created when people measure climate change on the Earth's time scale?

Measuring anything we do against the background of the Earth's time scale will be anomalous.

There's the global time scale: Earth has been here for 4+ billion years. Then there's us: we've been around as a species for only a million or so, and it's only been in the last 10,000 that we've developed agriculture and began to make extensive use of it. So all our crops have been developed during a time when climate patterns were stable and they have been developed with those climates in mind. Now we're busy changing that climate.

 

[FattyCatty]

I hope this is the right thread for this. I saw the article at physicsworld.com and thought it was interesting and a little worrying:

The Gulf Stream off eastern Canada appears to have advanced northward of its historical position in recent decades, possibly in response to anthropogenic climate change. That is according to researchers in North America and Switzerland who say that the changes could have some profound implications for marine life off the coast of Canada.

The new study focuses specifically on a region just off the coast of Nova Scotia. This section of the Atlantic is fed from the north by the cold waters of the Labrador Current, and from the south by the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream. The mixing of these two water flows creates a nutrient-rich ecosystem for species such as cod, which has attracted a large fishing industry.
<snip>
Reporting their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say that the dominance of the warm Gulf waters since the early 1970s appears to be largely unique within this bimillennial period. Although Sherwood's team links these changes with recent changes in global climate, it says that further analysis is need to investigate the effects on wider ocean circulation. "These water masses do appear to have changed significantly in recent years, though I must emphasize that we have only looked at a very specific region off the coast of Nova Scotia," says Sherwood.

If the Gulf Stream is advancing northward here, does that mean it's also changing elsewhere? I wonder what happens to Great Britain and Europe if the North Atlantic Drift moves or dies away. I've heard both that they would be colder without it and that it makes no difference. Or would the northward shift off Canada be more likely to move the current closer to Europe? Have there been predictions or modeling on the possible changes in ocean circulation because of climate change and on the implications of any changes?

I also wonder what "profound implications" means in terms of marine life. Will it all die out or move; will there be time to adapt for things like coral that are fixed and can't move away.

Has anyone read about this? Is it such a localized occurrence that there's no need to worry? I have family in Maine and know how disastrous it is when the fish go away (I still remember when suddenly there were no scallops).

 

[Dancing David]

Wha? Even if the poles melted entirely there will be places for people to go. Water World was fiction, not fact.

So all those farmers in Bangladesh will use whose land, you are obviously acting in a fight mode. Why not try reading what I write. Where are teh bangladeshi farmers going, your house?

More later.

 

[Trakar]

...I get the distinct impression you imagine everything staying the same way it is right now, just warmer. I can't imagine what society will look like 200 years from now. What I can tell you is people live quite comfortably right now in climates that differ by 10 degrees on average. So the climate in Chicago will be more like it is in Arizona today, big deal. This is the worst case scenario...

Is this seriously your understanding of what a 6ºC global average increase in temp. means?

Hopefully you are just being facetious and you actually understand that the difference between a snowball Earth and a desert planet is a range of only about 25ºC. Our planet is only ~5ºC warmer now than it was in the depths of the current ice age, and the PETM heat/anoxia extinction episode is only ~6ºC warmer than it is now.

(BTW - 6ºC is not the "worst case senario," it is only the upper end of the most likely increases given the conditions and senarios considered, and part of that particular senario involves humanity moving quickly and decisively to begin ending our technological fossil CO2 generation within the next few years and completely ending such emissions by 2030. There are increasing numbers of studies indicating the potential for much higher rises. It should also be noted that these are not upper limits of total thermal potential, but rather merely the projected levels we will reach by 2100 in an accelerating and intensifying cycle of warming. By way of comparison, you can turn on your oven set to 500ºF and reasonably calculate the temp rise after 1 minute, but this doesn't mean that the oven quits heating after that minute.
Likewise, these climate projections do not include potential cascading feedback trigger event effects.)

"Global Warming: East-West Connections" - http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2007/EastWest_20070925.pdf

"Earth’s hot past could be prologue to future climate" -
http://www2.ucar.edu/news/3628/earth-s-hot-past-could-be-prologue-future-climate

"Positive feedback between global warming and atmospheric CO2 concentration inferred from past climate change" - http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025044.shtml

"Missing feedbacks, asymmetric uncertainties, and the underestimation of future warming" -
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025540.shtml

"Researchers find future temperatures could exceed livable limits" - http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/100504HuberLimits.html

"When could global warming reach 4◦C?" - http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/67.full.pdf+html

many more available

 

[Trakar]

While insightful, I don't see how this relates to the deliberate misrepresentation created when people measure climate change on the Earth's time scale?

Measuring anything we do against the background of the Earth's time scale will be anomalous.

No more so than ignoring the future and only weighting concerns and considerations based upon the current quarter fiscal or political cycle time scales.

Much like saving for a child's college fund, planned retirement accounts or even the engineered life-cycle expectations and considerations of large-scale construction projects, tackling the very real complications and problems directly resulting from our burning of fossil fuels requires us to act in the present to address problems in the future, even if we personally will not live to see the times when those problems manifest.

 

[Trakar]

I got over that when I started eating meat again. With what's happening in Brazil you can't even eat tofu without being an accomplice to the dying off of species. Enough with the top predator guilt trip, we won. Yeah humans!
...

Eating meat has nothing to do with caring or not caring about the environment and biologic diversity. Eating cheap meat shipped across the planet while encouraging the unthinking destruction of diversity, is not about being a "top predator," nor does it capitalize on humanities supposed greatest strength, our intelligence, in fact, rather the opposite. Destroying that which you require for your own survival and the survival of your progeny is a dead-end path. And humanity continues to push its case for earning a Darwin award.

We don't have to give up meat, but it may be time to give up 99¢ take-out burgers imported from Chile

 

[Trakar]

I don't expect it will be cheap. But neither is going to zero carbon. Thankfully it will be spread out over 100 years. It's a ridiculously simple task with little urgency, if it needs to be done it will.

You're just ahead of your time

The effects will not wait until Jan. 1, 2100 before they become noticeable and expensive (we may well reach 4C increases by 2050). And even if we could wave a wand and stop all further emissions today, the effects will continue to occur for several centuries, just as the Earth's climate normalizes to the half-again to near doubling of CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere and oceans. It is cheaper to act sooner rather than later.

 

[Furcifer]

So all those farmers in Bangladesh will use whose land, you are obviously acting in a fight mode. Why not try reading what I write. Where are teh bangladeshi farmers going, your house?

More later.

I'm assuming where it isn't wet.