UN Report Downgrades Human Impact on Climate 378
GodInHell writes to mention an article in the Telegraph, stating that man's impact on the environment has been 'downgraded'. A UN report has found that our species has not had as large effect on climate change as was previously thought. The average temperature is still due to rise almost 5 degrees C in the next 100 years, bringing drastic changes in weather patterns. From the article: "The panel, however, has lowered predictions of how much sea levels will rise in comparison with its last report in 2001. Climate change skeptics are expected to seize on the revised figures as evidence that action to combat global warming is less urgent. Scientists insist that the lower estimates for sea levels and the human impact on global warming are simply a refinement due to better data on how climate works rather than a reduction in the risk posed by global warming."
Damn (Score:4, Funny)
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Boy I hear ya. Superman foiled my plans, too. Tights wearin git.
Most of these are 'Developing Countries' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most of these are 'Developing Countries' (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a difficult position, seeing as I saw one estimate that in terms of co2, China would overtake the US in roughly 5 years at current rates. (I'm not sure how accurate that is). It's truly got to be a global initiative, but one that doesn't do more harm than good. Plans like Kyoto makes huge exceptions for countries like China and India. This is of course good for them, not so good for everyone else.
In short, I have no idea what's going to happen
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Which is fortunate because sulfur dioxide combats global warming sort of the same way a nuclear winter combats global warming, but to a smaller scale. Many scientists are considering increasing sulfur dioxide emissions in certain locations if we can't do anything else to stop global warmi
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For example SO2 causes acid rain which damages vegatation releasing CO2. It's far to early to tell whether increasing SO2 emissions will help or will just cause a lot more damage. It's an interesting theory but it's still not well understood.
We've gone from trying to predict whether it will rain this afternoon to trying to predict the climate for 100 years. It's
Any Irony Here? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, when we chastise other nations for doing what we did 25 years ago, we may be hobbling them somewhat in the international market if we force them not to do that. I mean, look at the great infrastructure and products that we've produced while destroying the environment. You have to admit that it's given us an upper hand.
And this doesn't just apply to chemicals and gases, remember our 'save the rain forest' campaigns? Well, who was campaigning us to stop logging in North America (pictures on the right side [wikipedia.org])? We've literally deforested much of the United States and benefited from it quite a bit. Who's to say we're not completely hobbling the economies in 3rd world countries that are attempting to tap their nation's natural resources of wood?
I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative
Re:Any Irony Here? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right on. This is an angle that the environmental movement has not yet come to terms with. The gorilla in the room is not the carbon production of the currently industrialized countries, it is the carbon production in the near future (20-50 years) of the currently inductrializing countries, which are far more populous. Most of the rhetoric of the global warming movement has been centered about modest lifestyle changes in developing countries: smaller cars, power conservation, and subsidizing carbon neutral energy sources. These are easy changes to make for the average westerner: They don't strongly impact our quality of life. Too bad the the carbon withheld from the atmosphere due to these changes is so small compared to the quantities that will be released a generation from now from the populous countries that are currently industrializing.
For the global warming movement to address the gorilla in the room, they would have to ask people in China and India to forgo that first refrigerator, automobile, computer, tractor, or paved road. And that is not a morally defensable or politically feasable position. Until the global warming movement faces up to this fact their efforts in the developed world are just a sideshow.
I think human carbon emmisions contribute to global warming, and that human carbon emmisions will explode in the next 50 years due to the industrialization of populated countries and due to increasing carbon emissions from alternative oil sources. (Coal gassification, tar sands, extra heavy oil... all of these release a ton of carbon just to produce, before they are even burned!) Greens should be lobbying the governments of devloped countries hard for r&d into affordable carbon neutral technologies that can be scaled to the meet to enourmous quantities of energy that the developing world will soon be demanding. The only tech. I know of that is carbon neutral, sufficiently scalable, reasonably affordable, and could be implemented on a massive scale just one generation from now is nuclear fission. If greens aren't advocating for this than I don't think they are serious about putting a major dent in global warming.
Both these posts are ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
You are wrong. There are numerous environmental organizations working on the issues of the industrializing nations. Just because you have not heard of them, does not mean they do not exist. Here is jus [nature.org]
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Stagnate: To cease to flow; to be motionless
So the economy would be a little bit motionless ?
You could have said it would _slow_ the economy, less typing, and it even makes sense.
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This is important because We now know that some forms of pollution and emissions totally fuck everything up. Thats why we stopped, not just because it sounded like the next evolutionary step in the process. Imagine if we didn't discourage third world countries from placing their waste water and sewage runoff treatment facilities a quart mile upstream from their drinking water intake source
Re:Any Irony Here? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) it's been more than 25 years ago...
2) back then, nobody had much of any idea of the effects.
3) what we were doing was the pinacle of high tech at the time. Pollution controls didn't exist, until we invented them.
Today, the Chinese government certainly knows the cause and effects of pollution, know the technology exists to significantly reduce the problem, and yet they don't bother to use it, anyhow, usually for reasons of national pride (they'd have to buy this tech from foreign companies, instead of using extremely dirty domesticly made products).
THAT is the difference.
So China shouldn't have to pay for their own pollution or pollution controls? Somebody else should pay for it, for them?
Not likely. China is now quite wealthy, they just chose not to control their pollution, because nobody has forced them to do so. Threaten to ban Chinese imports if they aren't produced "green", and they'll straighten up real fast. Of course I realize the political will to play chicken with cheap Chinese junk just isn't there, but that's besides the point.
Risk assessment is lowered, politics apart (Score:2, Insightful)
The logic is so simple, it is even ridiculous: part of the risk of global warming is higher sea levels.
If sea levels are not expected to be so high, to the expected risk is not so high.
Now if (these) scientists think the risk is still high enough to still warrant our worries, that is quite another thing.
I for myself still think global warming could be nice, after the initial, inevitable adaptation pains. More crops,
Re:Risk assessment is lowered, politics apart (Score:4, Insightful)
Global warming does not imply more crops, or more habitable lands. It implies less. For example, a significant fraction of the world relies on the glaciers in the Himalayas for water. If those go, there will be vastly less habitable lands.
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The water doesn't have to come from glaciers, as long as there is precipitation in the mountains there will be water downstream. Global warming would only result in less arable land if it makes the world dryer overall, but most simulations show the world getting wetter if it gets hotter.
Glaciers vs. Rain (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is in how it's delivered. Having a steady flow of melt-water is much nicer for agriculture than occasional flash flooding, even if the later does provide more water per year on average.
--MarkusQ
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Flat out wrong. I couldn't immediately find a reference to contrast your lack of proof, but it becomes a moot point shortly.
All that floating ice melting would not raise the oceans even a millimeter. All the ice on land melting would not make much of a rise either... The worlds major ice stores are in Antarctica and Greenland. If that all melted the oceans would not rise enough to cause many problems.
All
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Bzzt. The list is all about local effects, and part of what I described as painful adaptation may include migration from areas adversely affected to areas favourably affect. In fact, it is ludicrous to think about colder and longer winters globally when the issue is global warming.
Anyway, Russians haven't migrated in masse from Moscow because it has cold, long winters and hot, dry summ
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So what? It will be neither the first nor the last mass extinction. Nature has recovered everytime, and the Earth has been shaken quite a few times. If anything, it seems that biological diversity has been increasing except for some minor human-induced damage in the last two or three centuries.
We can't be sentimental about natu
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We(Humans) have become the caretakers of the world environment through our technology and population growth. I believe it even says something about this in the bible. If we don't care about our environment - in which we live - than may we go extinct as well, since we will deserve nothing less.
Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048 [cbsnews.com] Seafood May Be Gone by 2 [nationalgeographic.com]
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Not. We have to take care of ourselves. If that necessitates our taking care of the environment, so be it; but we must be clear about what is the goal. Romanticising nature won't help when the poor of the world revolt against about we caring more about a few coastal areas than about human misery, and if their misery and ignorance end up compounding the possible problems of global warming.
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On the topic of more habitable lands, that seems pretty ridiculous to me. If the sea level rises [nationalgeographic.com], earth's total land mass will decrease significantl
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These are two ideas that are very difficult to reconcile. There must be lots of place with the opposite effects, and places with no significant humidity difference. BTW, less ice and more sea would in the average mean more humidity, whi
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I was trying to give a bunch of examples as to why that probably wouldn't be true (in my opinion, definitely won't be true). My intention was not to prove the effects of global warming, just to list other possible consequences of it, which I felt the parent poster ne
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did the maths (not very well) on how much this would be about half a year ago on Slashdot, but can't find it now
Ahah, found it! http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19327 8&cid=15860180 [slashdot.org]. As I said, it wasn't a very accurate calculation, and Muttley [slashdot.org] poked some holes in it, but it gives you a ballpark.
Never mind, Captain Smith... (Score:5, Funny)
Report details (Score:5, Funny)
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All of this so called global warming garbage just makes me shake my head. I guess no one ever cared to look at the output from the sun, which, has GROWN (ie:hotter) over the last several years. If you turn up your furnace, guess what? Your house gets hotter.
If it is due to the Sun, the stratosphere would be warming as well; however, the stratosphere is cooling. Moreover, if it is purely down to the Sun, then why do temperature changes so closely match CO2 concentrations?
I know that most of the hysteria surrounding global warming is just scientist who are hell bent on maintaing their current level of government funding (suckling at the trough)
Who on Earth is paying scientists to produce evidence showing that climate change exists? Certainly not the current administrations. No-one stands to benefit in the least from fabricating evidence. For your hypothesis to be correct, the entire, vast scientific community around the world,
So man-made CO2 doesn't matter anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll celebrate by having baked beens and onions for dinner.
Re:So man-made CO2 doesn't matter anymore? (Score:4, Informative)
I missed this discovery... (Score:2)
Wow, so uh, the aerosol sprays were helping? Damn... I'm getting rid of these awful pump-style hairspray bottles!
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Mind Boggles (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait...wait...the sea won't rise as high, and yet the risk is the same...someone explain that one to me.
Personally I've always been a fan of the 'Humans aren't capable of doing much damage to the Earth' theorists who say it's due to the sun becoming hotter (which happens quite often, don'
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Suppose it's not an obvious fact. Suppose there were only a 50% chance that human activity is really the cause of the global climate change we're observing.
What is the prudent course of action?
"the debate is over"? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"the debate is over"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, the earth can certainly handle what we're throwing at it; even if we succeed in wiping ourselves and 99% of existing species out, evolution will just continue with the remaining 1% and produce something that can handle the new conditions. It won't be the first mass extinction.
Make no mistake: it's not about "saving the earth", it's about saving the human race, or at least civilization as we know it.
When I see a Monday night football game in Seattle in November, and there's snow on the ground, I can only conclude "global warming" is causing it. Sure.
You're missing the "global" in global warming. Just because the earth as a whole is getting warmer and the ice caps are melting, it doesn't necessarily mean your backyard is getting a tropical climate. For some regions the long-term prognosis is that it will get a whole lot colder -- for example, western Europe if the gulf stream shuts off.
One reasonable inference we can make is that weather will get more violent and less predictable, simply because we're pushing more energy into a system that exhibits chaotic behaviour. So expect more freak weather -- and on a local, short-term level, that's could just as well be snowstorms as heatwaves.
You see... This is the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Make no mistake: it's not about "saving the earth", it's about saving the human race, or at least civilization as we know it.
We've gone from a 5C raise in average temperature and say 20' raise in sea levels to the end of civilisation, the extinction of the human race, 99% of the life on the planet and the end of the plant itself.
It's ALL bullshit. Hyperbolic hysteria and it harms the case of the environmentalists.
Civilisation will not end.
The human race will certainly not become extinct.
99% of the existing species will also not be made extinct.
The planet will not end.
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Yes, five degrees sounds so innocuous, doesn't it? But a 5-degree rise across the whole earth requires an enormous input of energy, and can have enormous consequences. The temperature difference between now and the last glacial period -- with ice sheets covering much of North America and Eurasia -- is around 8 degrees.
and say 20' raise in sea levels to the end of civilisation
A 20-inch sea-level rise isn't so trivial either; in Bangladesh alone, that translat
Re:"the debate is over"? (Score:5, Insightful)
[Emphasis mine.]
Nicely trolled, sir. You've begged the question quite nicely, and you'd have effectively sand-bagged any reasoned response, except you forgot something: Your understanding doesn't matter. Your failure to comprehend scientific consensus has no effect on the accuracy of the findings, nor on the continuing refinement of the data models, which, after all, is what this story is reporting about.
Absolutely right, and on several of those occasions, the conditions were antithetical to human existence. See, the issue here is not saving the planet. Earth will do just fine, thank you very much. The issue, if I may, is saving the humans, who are not nearly so resilient, and to whom, heaven knows why, many of us seem to have a sentimental attachment. Perhaps it has something to do with being human ourselves.
HTH, HAND.
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That's just more nonsense. Humans are as resilient as pretty much any creature on the planet, except perhaps cockroaches, especially where climate is concerned. The average temperature would have to rise pretty substantially -- which would almost definately be checked by evaporative cooling fro
Re:"the debate is over"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, nobody's understanding matters.
I know a few things about global warming but I'm hardly a scientist. I do know what to look for when I'm gaging expertise, and total ignorance of evidence and blindly calling everyone a 'troll' who disagrees with you will definitely get your idea flushed down my mind's toilet.
The studies on this subject are not actually all that hard to read. When all is said and done, temperatures have only risen 0.6 [bbc.co.uk] degrees in the past 100 years. Yes I know it doesn't matter what happens globally, but in specific and dangerous locations like Greenland (whose ice loss we now know was exaggerated [nationalgeographic.com]).
This is all in addition to the standard gripes I have with the sensationalism and lies [bbc.co.uk] coming from the media, and the near silence of the scientific community unless confronted by inquisitive people. Peer review doesn't work if nobody's willing to speak. Essentially, the reported findings of the world's largest climate experiment stated "11 degrees"... the data really pointed to 3 degrees. "Peer review" was silent until a journalist ASKED them. Listen to the radio show link (earlier in this paragraph), it's chilling (note my brand new global warming pun!).
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So much for post-modern, secular humanism, eh? We are not omnipotent and omniscient.
Actually, it's religions that are into the whole "omnipotent and omniscient" bit, not secular humanists.
When I see a Monday night football game in Seattle in November, and there's snow on the ground, I can only conclude "global warming" is causing it. Sure.
On the other hand, there have been a bunch of 60 degree days in late November and early December in the Northeast. What happens when you add more energy to a stable
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We do?
I'm not sure what world you live on, but on Earth, we don't - and I don't know very many people who believe this. I hear some anonymous strangers on the internet saying things like this, but when it comes to people I actually know and trust, I haven't ever heard anyone express this opinion.
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I'm not sure why you think your ignorance is an interesting topic of discussion for the rest of us.
Re:"the debate is over"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Straw man argument do not lead to good policy decisions.
>we simply don't know
There could be no better argument for avoiding large-scale experiments, then. But we do know that CO2 levels are rising, that it's not coming from living organisms, and that the pattern of change (warmer lower atmosphere, cooler upper atmosphere, warmer nights) matches the effects physics says to expect from CO2.
>So much for post-modern, secular humanism, eh?
Straw man arguments do not lead to good policy decisions.
>The earth has been around 6 billion years, give or take
4.5 billion.
>now we're to believe that somehow earth's perfect harmonial environemntal equilibirum, which never ever existed in the first place, is being upset by man?
Straw man arguments do not lead to good policy decisions. Neither do non sequiturs: none of the big excursions in the geological record happened while we were trying to feed six billion humans with climate-sensitive crops. Or had hundreds of millions of humans living within a few meters of sea level.
>When I see a Monday night football game in Seattle in November, and there's snow on the ground
A dry day in Seattle doesn't mean the climate is dry. A rainy day in Tucson doesn't mean the climate is wet. The fact that there was a cold day in winter in one place is not climate data. Confusing weather with climate, like the media do when they yammer about a heat wave during a climate change conference, is stupid.
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And until we do know, we should be careful about greenhouse gas emissions.
Or do the "better safe than sorry" not mean much to people?
This is a logic I haven't really understood in this debate -- people go on about "we don't know if it's much about us!" like it was going to help.
That's actually an even worse scenario, where we need to be extra careful until we do know the extent of our responsibility for the detected dramatic changes in at
Of course we're changing our environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether the long-term effect of what we do is 10 degrees of warming, 5 degrees of warming, or even 5 degrees of cooling, we're still have a pretty drastic affect on the poor earth. Apparently, there is new research coming out all the time (and not from the grand right-wing conspiracy) that global warming isn't happening as fast as some think. But does it really matter that it's slower than we thought? We still have to confront the same issues. Net carbon increase, particulates, and nitrous oxides, all of which damage our health, as well as the environment.
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What we're looking for is probably for another cure for cancer than an improved environment.
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What the hell are you talking about? (Score:3, Informative)
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In the book Ghost Map [amazon.ca], Steven Johnson shows how Cholera was transmitted through the consumption of polluted drinking water in Victorian London. The disease spread easily because people were drinking water they took a shit in. So what'll be the next big epidemic that's spread through the consumption of polluted air? Ah wait, I think I already found one. [wikipedia.org] This gives the expression "the shit hitting the fan" a totally new meaning. :P
Re:Of course we're changing our environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Economic growth. As we get richer we are less willing to tolerate pollution and can afford to pay for the removal of pollution. (It's just the growth of the NIMBY movement writ large.)
Compare, say, Taiwan and China who are at lower levels of economic development with big US or UK cities. The US and UK cities are immesurably cleaner. Furthermore, these same US or UK cities that you are complaining about are much cleaner than they were, say, 100 or even 50 years ago. Why do you think countries moved to unleaded petrol? Because they could afford to. Lead is cheaper as an additive, but the side effects in terms of smog are pretty dire. Consider, even, the move to diesel as a more environmentally friendly fuel. It happened because we could afford to develop high efficiency diesel engines and low-sulphur fuels.
So people are not ignoring pollution - its just that they prefer to have functional hospitals and schools and police forces. And when they can afford to they'll get rid of as much pollution as they want to. And when enough people care enough about greenhouse gas emissions to actually pay for it in their electricity bill (using the alternative energy suppliers that seem to be popping up in many countries) they will switch.
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The Earth doesn't give a shit. The only ones who care or are even AWARE of an impact are the stupid hairless monkeys that infest every continent.
"Net carbon increase, particulates, and nitrous oxides, all of which damage
They change the environment, they don't damage it. The earth started (apparently) a coalescing ball of dust and rock, for a long time was little more than a sphere of semisolid molten rock. For the majorit
Doesn't matter what's causing it, we can slow it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's clear that it's heppening, now do we want it to happen faster, or slower?
Re:Doesn't matter what's causing it, we can slow i (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Doesn't matter what's causing it, we can slow i (Score:5, Insightful)
Mucking about doing unnatural things like burning less oil?
Cow Farts = Global Warming (Score:2, Flamebait)
Quit guilting SUVs (Score:2)
for cars most of them get abysmal mileage. 18 in the city? Sheesh, my crossover averages 21 and its bigger than many sedans.
A lot of cars are overpowered today. For the most part SUVs suffer because of their size and gearing. Too many are still geared to tow which many people will never do. But whats the excuse of all the new 8cylinder and overpowered 6 cylinder cars?
I already use my motor
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The truth of the matter is that our landfills are giving off more methane than cows. The first step should be to collect that gas. As for cows farting, I gather there are several orders of magnitude more people on the planet than cows, who have th
Ummm, hang on a sec... (Score:3, Informative)
Man has undeniably had a huge effect on the environment; making species extinct, over fishing/hunting other species to the point of extinction, using up the Earth's non-renewable fuel sources - wood, oil, coal, building over huge chunks of the planet, not to mention the various poisons, dioxins and various nuclear stuff we throw into the atmosphere, ground and oceans.
In this case the submitter has his facts wrong. The Telegraph article linked mentions only climate change, not man's impact on the environment as a whole. Sorry to nitpick, but I see those words being substituted for each other way too much now. You can argue all you like about climate change, but man's impact on the environment as a whole is proven.
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Main Entry: environment
Pronunciation: in-'vI-r&(n)-m&nt, -'vI(-&)r(n)-
Function: noun
1 : the circumstances, objects, or conditions by which one is surrounded
2 a : the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival b : the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the lif
Energy Crises Redux (Score:2)
The more things change the more they stay the same.
It was really funny watching people try to explain in 1985, after the oil crash, exactly why they so confidently predicted permanent oil shortages only 5 years before. I can't
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And that is happening right now. So, what was wrong with that sentiment?
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Show me the report (Score:2)
Doesn't really matter (Score:2)
The climate change "skeptics" mostly come from a position of not wanting to change anything about the way we live on this planet. They never really cared about environmental effe
Let's try a new metaphor ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Let us imagine that one night you wake up and discover that your house is on fire.
You dial 999 (or 911, if you're American) and ask for help: the nice despatcher tells you that the police department were watching your house and they're pretty sure there was no arsonist.
Do you think, "oh, it's not an arson attack," and go back to bed?
(Or do you evacuate the burning building anyway, and wait for the fire service to get there?)
Here's the point: the house is on fire. It doesn't matter why it's on fire, in the first instance; the fire is an emergency situation and needs to be dealt with regardless of the cause.
And by analogy, it doesn't matter whether the observations of climactic change are attributable to anthropogenic warming or to some other cause, or to a mixture of causes -- if we don't take action we're going to be in deep shit.
Re:Let's try a new metaphor ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone tells you that, if you don't take drastic action right now, your house will catch on fire some time in the next 100 years. A while back, the same guy was telling you the house was going to be flooded due to the same actions that will now, supposedly cause that fire.
The current "fire prediction panel" has downgraded the actual fire risk, to boot, since all of their previous predictions of fire have not come true, and it turns out that some of the evidence they were using to predict the fire was actually made up. It seems that the computer model they were using also predicts fire if you put random noise into the input hopper.
Meanwhile, the people who scream most about how the fire will destroy the house are going to bed while smoking, while insisting that you need to turn out all of your lights and sleep on the floor.
I don't understand all these metaphors! (Score:2)
Then, if your house burns down, just stay somewhere else [wikipedia.org] for a while while someone [wikipedia.org] builds you a new house [wikipedia.org].
Re:Let's try a new metaphor ... (Score:4, Insightful)
So you institute an imediate policy againsts lit cigarettes of all types within 100 yards of your house and comission some studies on house fires.
Over the years, your studies begin to reveal that while cigarettes can cause a fire, it's not the most likely cause.
Do you continue your capaign against cigarettes or do you revise your protection models.
The point is, your house isn't on fire, it's at risk, but effective safety is knowing which risks are most important to minimize.
Also the point is that analogies are shitty, why don't you just say what you mean, which is, despite the fact that the study shows human impact is lesser AND shows that newer understandings demonstrate a reduced risk, you would rather blindly continue with current policies as is, much like the few crackpots who completely deny global warming want to continue with their current policies as is.
Close to a non-story (Score:2)
Then, the revised forecast includes one scenario of a 4.5 degrees C rise in average global temperature. That's still well into the severe range.
Keep one thing in mind... (Score:2)
I can only say it wasn't very "calming" to me:
UN downgrades fears of global warming (Score:3, Funny)
Equal time for fringe views (Score:3, Informative)
However, Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact," he said.
Of course, they don't bother to say who these people are, or the fringe views they hold. From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
In November 2004, IPN released a report claiming that "climate change is 'a myth', sea levels are not rising and Britain's chief scientist is 'an embarrassment' for believing catastrophe is inevitable." It called "the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change
More accurate information makes it more urgent (Score:2)
Some of the claims being made by some environmentalists were quite simply ridiculous, fearmongering undermines their whole arguement.
I'm glad that someone is finally putting together more accurate and reasonable data. This might get more support as more people accept it.
Oh and score one for those who claimed the fearmongering was a bit of an exageration.
Irrelevant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, newpapers show that they have absolutely zero knowledge of science or statistics. Tell me, if I do two experiments to try and find the radius of the earth, and find the first time that my results are 6,370 +/- 3210 km, and the second time that my results are 6370 +/- 10km , is this 'junk science' because my upper bound has dropped by 33%? Of course not. All this quote shows is that their calculations are getting more precise. If you want to show that they were wrong in their last report you'd have to show a large change in their AVERAGE value, and since the sensationalist reporter here didn't bother to even quote it, there's nothing we can say.
By the way, if you want to, you can see projections of sea level from the 2001 report online [grida.no]. The sea level rise for several different scenarios [grida.no] is given in the graph on the right. The overall error bounds are larger because they combine all the data for these scenarios, which are vastly different in their assumptions about economic, technological and population growth in the next century.
Note how the article ends (Score:4, Informative)
Most often when a reporter puts a quote at the end of the article, that quote presents the conclusion the reporter would like the reader to take away. In this case, it wasn't even worth the reporter's time explaining who in hell the "International Policy Network" is, let alone why an opinion from them should be pertinent here. Note also that the article above that details a lowered prediction of sea level rise precisely because there is now better data. So Mr. Morris's comment is a non sequitor.
Old environmentalism vs new environmentalism (Score:2)
Now the "new environmentalism" says you can assign a dollar value to every kind of environmental damage and instead of preventing the damage you can recover the lost value by feeding money into another cause.
Use all the lead you want but compensate by paying into disposal funds. Mak
17 inches in 100 years? How is this a big deal? (Score:3, Informative)
In the ocean, you already have tides and storms and such. I think that 17 inches would have even LESS of an impact in the ocean, since those other effects already have to be accounted for when finding a good spot to put a dock or a house.
And, if we have 100 years to deal with this, I really don't know why we don't just take a couple billion dollars or so from one of these studies and invest it in some high-growth investment market and just let compound interest give us the solution? If Kyoto would put any significant pressure (like, at least %1) on the $13 trillion American economy, we could just go without Kyoto and put that $130 billion a year for twenty years and then pay every islander in the world a $5000 stipend every year forever from the interest earned? I mean, I could survive on $5000 a year, and I live in America! That amount of money would allow one to pretty much live in luxury in a third world country. Am I the only one who thinks that Kyoto would put more pressure than just 1% on the American economy, assuming it was actually followed?
If a sea level rise of 17 inches is really one of the biggest problems of global warming, then it sure doesn't make me that worried (especially since Minnesota is land-locked and, hey, it gets pretty cold here in the winter...).
I know this is /. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think someone really, really hates the UN (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Funny how the UN changes its mind every 5 minut (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing admirable about stubbornness in face of facts. I, for one, am glad that the UN isn't dragging it's feet on this issue. If only others were so prescient.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Re: (Score:2)
It's also strange how you're glossing over the fact that the US is a member of the UN and voted on this issue. Guess how they voted? Well despite not having any troops involved they insisted that UNAMIR (the UN forces) should be withdrawn.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
freaking reality check... hello! (Score:3, Insightful)
ocean levels rising
large swaths of the most densely populated land in the world vanishing beneath the waves
tropical diseases heading north
the desertification of the tropics
Yes, we will deal with it. We'll probably handle it the same way that we handled the wars that you mentioned: by fighting each other and making a bad situation worse.
Would you tell a heroin addict to co