Global Warming On Pace For 4 Degrees: World Bank Worried

iONiUM writes "From the article: 'Over the years at the U.N. climate talks, the goal has been to keep future global warming below 2C. But as those talks have faltered, emissions have kept rising, and that 2C goal is now looking increasingly out of reach. Lately, the conversation has shifted toward how to deal with 3C of warming. Or 4C. Or potentially more." Overall it seems that poorer, less developed nations will be largely impacted negatively, while some countries (like Canada and Russia) will actually experience benefits. Where does that leave the rest of the 1st world countries?"

If Canada is spared that is enough for USA

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

They have enough land, and enough oil in tar sands too. Too bad, Canada, we need some breathing space lebensraum [wikipedia.org], so we are going to have to invade you and take you over. Too bad your experiments with pinko single payer health care and welfare state has to end this way. Learn the fine distinctions between co-pay, co-insurance, deductible and life-time caps.

Re:Quick...

[alen]

the midwest had a drought for years in the 80's. I remember farm aid.

its a wet/dry cycle that lasts a few decades and alternates

Nations? What nations?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we hit a warming of 4 degrees, you can forget about nations or countries as we know it. The civilization may well collapse. If we hit 6 degrees, say hello to the next mass extinction. "It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles." Details on this article [independent.co.uk].

No idea if this is change one can believe in, but it looks like a very serious change... er, problem.

Re:Cause?

[SirGarlon]

If you want to counteract it, you kind of need to understand the root cause. However, given that there's been 90% consensus among the scientific community for more than a decade, the root cause is not really in question. At this point, posing the question of what causes climate change is code for saying, "addressing the known cause would have adverse impact on me, so I deny the known cause."

Re:Quick...

[MightyMartian]

You heard wrong:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong [guardian.co.uk]

Re:And in the mean time US OIl production increase

[crazyjj]

The U.S. and Europe aren't to blame, Sparky. Our CO2 emissions have been either steady on on a downward trend for some time. If you want to point fingers, look at China.

Re:Devil's Advocate

[MightyMartian]

Your posting bullshit:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com]

No folks, AGW did not stop in 1998.

In Other News

[sycodon]

Little Change in Global Drought in the past 60 Years [nature.com]

Re:Global Warming vs US Government Debt?

[bhlowe]

Democrat in office. If a Republican were in, it would be non-stop stories of anti-war protests, massive layoffs, crony capitalism, the tragedy of the homeless, the poor state of our schools, rising crime rates... and yes, the deficit, and how "unpatriotic" high debt is would be front page. I lived in San Francisco under both Bush's and the papers were filled with the horror stories of living under a Republican... With Obama in, the anti-war protests have stopped, the sea levels have stopped rising, and the economy is always improving.

Re:Cause?

[Burning1]

So far exactly zero of the 'models' have managed to predict anything, so it would seem our science on the matter
is incorrect.

You sir, are a tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model#Accuracy_of_models_that_predict_global_warming [wikipedia.org]

Re:Quick...

[bunratty]

No, the scale of distance is not the difference between weather and climate. The climate is the probability distribution, and the weather on a particular day is a sample from that distribution. Let's say that the mean high temperature for November is 40 degrees where you live. On any particular day, it may be 30 degrees or 50 degrees. Another way to explain it is the climate determines what clothes are in your closet, and the weather determines what you wear on a given day. It's far easier to predict the climate than the weather. The climate next decade will be very nearly what it is this decade. Right now, it looks like it will be slightly warmer, perhaps 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius warmer, as it has been the past several decades.

Re:Quick...

[sycodon]

Reposting since it seems relevant here...

Little Change in Global Drought in the past 60 Years [nature.com] [nature.com]

Re:Quick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how you hold onto falsified anti-fracking propaganda, yes it was falsified and the people who did that are facing charges for doing so. So you support falsified "science" as long as it matches up with your political views then?

Gasland misled [heartland.org]

I guess you fall right in line with AWG as well, seeing as Phil Jones deleted research data instead of risking having it peer-reviewed as well, but I'm sure your all good with that as well since it is also a lie that will probably line up with your political views.

I've noticed in the last few years that the truth no longer matters in the US. Its all about having the "correct" policical views and doing whatever it takes to smear the people telling truth that doesn't line up with that.

Re:Nations? What nations?

[jovius]

I learned new concepts today regarding the Global Warming.

• An anoxic event [wikipedia.org], which is related to the sea temperature, could potentially lead to increased hydrogen sulfide emissions [wikipedia.org], which can poison the atmosphere.
• Vast areas of Earth can be rendered uninhabitable because of the "sudden" rise in the wet-bulb temperature [sciencedaily.com]. No time to adapt.
• Evapotranspiration [sciencedaily.com] may already be severely disrupted. The consequence may be a feedback loop to a drying Earth.
• Clathrate gun hypotesis [wikipedia.org] - the rising temperatures lead to a feedback loop of ever increasing methane

It's worrisome that currently everything is pointing to an increased possibility of aforementioned things happening. All of this while the humanity itself is releasing as much CO2 into the atmosphere per year as an extinction level super volcano [usgs.gov].

I'm not sure what to think of this. I feel like we already all past the point of no return. The forced reduction of the human activity because of the change in the external conditions can be considered as a natural negative feedback cycle.

Re:I save money!

[bzipitidoo]

A global warming skeptic who actually knows something? How refreshing!

Still, you state a number of errors and assumptions.

hold onto your wallet while not panicking

So you think changes are a net cost? Making our energy usage more efficient is more often a net gain. Worth doing regardless of whether there is global warming. Of course you can spend hugely on things such as expensive materials that are lightweight, but there's no need, not when there is so much low hanging fruit we're ignoring. We blow a lot of money on peacock style displays. People buy large vehicles and houses for the sake of appearances. Surely we can find some other way to show off that doesn't risk the climate. There's even better stuff than that. How about smarter traffic lights? Or do you enjoy idling at a red light while no traffic is present on the cross street?

using YOUR favorite cherrypicked interval

Cherry picking is something the deniers do. Responsible scientists don't. If you have evidence that scientists have deliberately misused available data, or analysis that shows they've just plain gotten it wrong, why don't you publish the specifics?

Might as well start in 16000 BCE

No! Now who is the cherry picker? Why do you want to chose that start time? What's your reason? Seems pretty obvious you chose that date because it's the middle of the last glaciation.

or we could look at the entire dataset back to the Ordovician-Silurian transition

If you want to go back that far, you have to take into account a lot of changed variables, starting with the radically different configuration of the continents. You would do better to look at more recent events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Still plenty of variables to juggle. The most recent major geologic change is the formation of a land connection between North and South America about 3 million years ago, breaking a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific, and creating the Gulf Stream. That's the point in time in which the climate settled into the patterns we know today, and from then to the present is the period which perforce gives us the most useful data for figuring out what the climate should be like. Before that, there was the Messinian Salinity Crisis which ended about 5 million years ago, in which the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic. Data from conditions in those periods can't correlate as well, but is still useful.