UN Climate Change Panel: It's Happening, and It's Almost Entirely Man's Fault 695
iONiUM writes The UN released a new climate change report which concludes that it is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault. From the article: "The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made." However, the report isn't entirely dire. It goes on to say: "To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to 'near zero or below in 2100.'" Below zero of course means mining existing CO2 out of the atmopshere somehow.
My two cents (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether it's human caused or not. Whether climate change/global warming/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is happening or not. Whether we can actually stop it or not.
Let's just stop pollution for it's own sake!
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Re:My two cents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My two cents (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My two cents (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the problem with that [theeagleonline.com]:
and
Environmental righteousness makes rich people feel good about themselves. But it hurts the world's poor.
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Environmental righteousness makes rich people feel good about themselves. But it hurts the world's poor.
Don't forget it also kills people. Remember when various parts of africa were starving and they were going to get GMO corn, but they went off the deep end and called it "poison." Yeah, how many people did that kill again?
Re:My two cents (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't speak for what Africans may have said, but it's probably for the best that Monsanto doesn't now own their food supply.
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How does that policy work? Who gets to hand out exemptions? On what basis? By what authority?
Re:My two cents (Score:5, Interesting)
Clean energy is cheaper and helps the poor. In Nigeria they are building up electricity supplies with geothermal, for example, which is cheap and doesn't make the people living near it ill. Pollution has a very real cost, especially if you are poor and can't avoid it. Coal is only cheap when it is allowed to harm people.
Much of Africa lacks an electricity grid anyway. This is a golden opportunity for them to build distributed energy supplies. Such supplies are cheap too, and more importantly available because no-one is going to build out grid infrastructure to places that can't afford to pay for the energy it carries. Solar PV and batteries to provide lighting in the evenings is a massive deal for developing nations.
As for burning stuff, they don't need electric heating. They need a clean burner, that vents the dust and soot outside their homes. Biomass is carbon neutral, and actually the ash could be captured and used too if they had the equipment.
A western lifestyle is neither necessary nor the best option for much of the world.
Not our fault! (Score:5, Funny)
Men were fine living in caves with one campfire each. We only invented cars and electricity to impress women.
Haters gonna hate (Score:4, Insightful)
That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.
I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat and Pollution is not because they're dumb, but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.
First rule of politics and law: never admit fault.
So everyone's wasting their time trying to convince the deniers of anything. They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.
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Who would pay for the cleanup? And how would you purpose to ask developing countries to restrain themselves?
You do realize people would have started doing it long ago if it's seen as affordable?
Who pays for cleanup (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone is going to pay one way or another... some just seem to think starting with prevention will be cheaper than dealing with scrambling for a cure later on.
Others, understandably, will just keep chugging along as they're accustomed to. No reason to change your ways if the sky isn't falling. Can't get blamed for anything that happens that you don't see coming. Can't be held accountable for it either. And they probably won't.
Case in point: drought... (whether it's related to Anthropogenic Climate Change or not is irrelevant). As you may recall, farmers in CA had to ration their water rights this year. The government stepped in and enforced a 30% reduction on farms as they have during past droughts.
For the smaller farms that had already invested in more efficient drip irrigation technologies, this pretty much means they suffered a 30% reduction in crop output, since they're already getting the maximum crop output from their water.
For the larger farms that were using inefficient flood irrigation, they got a nice emergency government subsidy to upgrade to drip irrigation. So they had the same crop output as before this year, because the increases in efficiencies more than made up for reduced quota.
So as you see, under the system we have in place now, it absolutely makes sense to be as wasteful as possible from an entirely rational perspective. The early adopters will bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning things up both before and after issues arise. That's logic. That's the way it is.
For my part, I recently moved to a part of the US which is almost all hydro and wind power. Utilities are expensive. I pay more to to the sanitation dept. to clean my water runoff than it costs to deliver.
1/2 of the world's population lives in southeast Asia... including China, India, etc.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-... [kinja-img.com]
They've been enacting lots of policies to deal with pollution and resources, stuff you'd absolutely hate to have here in the West. The smart and rich ones come here to get away from the pollution and crowding at home. It's nice.
Re:Haters gonna hate (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat
I really hope that's not your understanding of the theory of global warming, because it's so completely wrong only someone who uses words like 'haters' would think it........
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You're right. But it's not so much that I don't want to pay; I've always paid my way. I just don't like the price that you name. Same old socialist solution; different cause this time.
Re:Haters gonna hate (Score:4, Insightful)
Forty years ago, this same "evidence" was used to gin up the coming "Ice Age." Now, the same evidence is used to gin up the coming "Global Inferno."
Utter and complete bullshit which is why you deniers always get tossed into the intellectual dustbin.
A few people were concerned that we might be going back into another ice age. There was some suggestive data . It was never accepted by most climatologists. Unlike the current situation where the vast majority of professionals agree on the general outlines of the issue.
Fell free to espouse your intellectual superiority over thousands of professional scientists. Who, unlike yourself, realize that they can be wrong and are still working actively to figure out the details. And surprise, some of the things we think will happen aren't going to. And some things we think won't happen will.
But it's not made up, it's not a conspiracy to piss you off or get more grant funds. It's not even a conspiracy to get the little countries of the world some power over the big industrial powers. It's just complicated physics.
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Why, in a supposedly scientific study of warning is the source of warming (ie: the Sun) ignored and/or considered a constant in every study?
It isn't.
Rgds
Damon
Re:Let's talk about the Sun... And Mars too (Score:4, Informative)
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http://www.climate4you.com/Sun... [climate4you.com]
On that graph, the solar irradiance varies from 1363 to 1368 since 1978 so under 1/2 of a percent.
That is indeed not really significant.
The sun activity cycle of 11 years is also very visible but it more in the range of 1/10 of a percent.
I know one thing for sure (Score:2, Funny)
This report is going to cause Rush Limbaugh to have diarrhea.
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This report is going to cause Rush Limbaugh to have diarrhea.
Actually, it will give Mr. Limbaugh two more weeks of material to make money out of. I assure you that he loves the IPCC...
The easiest solution (Score:5, Funny)
it [ climate change ] is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault
So let's find this man and ask him if he wouldn't mind stopping, please?
From the: The Media has failed us Department (Score:3, Insightful)
Entertained (Score:4, Insightful)
A nation of couch potatoes looks up at you briefly, small strings of spittle pendant from their slack jaws, then turn their blank eyes back to the latest American Idol or Survivor episode. They are Nero. The TV is the fiddle. The government is the very essence of corrupt Rome. Or, if you like, McDonald's is the bread, and TV the circus. The problem is, as it has been for some time, is that modern Americans are absolutely immune to critical thinking, and are in no way concerned about it. This is why our society is crumbling around us with regard to our rights, liberties, property, responsibility and future prospects.
Welcome to the last stage of failure of a constitutional republic: unsustainable grab-it-all oligarchy.
Good to know! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the same UN Climate Panel that was predicting 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010, and then silently pulled all mentions of this from their website when 2010 rolled around and they turned out to be off by 50 million?
Re:Good to know! (Score:4, Insightful)
They probably just had the date a little early, give them at least half a decade, look at all the refugees in the middle east right now. Climate change played a big part in triggering the Syrian civil war.
Some anti-CO2 efforts CAUSE starvation (Score:3)
A fair amount of starvation has actually been caused by the effort to FIGHT global warming. In particular, the US biofuels mandate was justified as a way to combat global warming - biofuels are alleged to be a carbon-neutral form of energy. But diverting cropland from growing food to growing fuel makes food more expensive. That creates starvation and causes riots and war and refugees. In short, the effort to fight global warming has itself CREATED some of the very problem it claims to be attempting to fight
The Galileo effect ... (Score:2)
... where MUCH later, official apologies are issued all around by the deniers.
It's Man's Fault (Score:4, Insightful)
What does it matter if it's man's fault? If it turned out that this was all part of a natural cycle that was going to kill us all, then we would have just as much reason to do something about it as if it was our fault.
The real question has always been how much do we spend in order to prevent the damage that is coming. This report seems to be saying "Please turn off everything". So, in order to prevent a large portion of humanity dying, we should stop using the technology that is currently keeping many of them alive. Studies like this are yet another diversion from a real practical discussion of how we make the best of the situation we're in.
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I think George Carlin explains this pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Where in the report doors it say that? Be specific with full citations
Re:It's Man's Fault (Score:5, Informative)
I know it's not fashionable to RTFA but the IPCC report does propose actual solutions and costs those solutions (which will have negligible net cost)... they are the well-know solutions of more renewables, nuclear power and carbon sequestration along with a carbon tax.
The problem is that the corporations which have become rich on the current high CO2 emission path control the world's economies and governments so I can safely predict that nothing meaningful will be done and that we are all literally toast.
For more information (and interesting read), Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything"
http://books.simonandschuster.... [simonandschuster.com]
Yea...nuclear power (Score:4, Insightful)
Like green peace is going to support ANY nuclear power options....
the ones to blame are the 350.org, etc (Score:4, Informative)
Yet, America as a whole, produces less than 15% of the CO2. Likewise, our per capita is less than 16.
BUT, what is most important, is the fact that our production and per capita are dropping each and every year for the last 7 years.
How does this compare to other nations? Well, China, who is given a pass by these groups, now account for more than 33% of yearly CO2 production. In addition, their per capita is now above most of Europe's and will beat America's within 3 years.
At this time, most of the west continues to drop their CO2 though Germany's is back on the rise since they shut down their nuke plants and are replacing them with new coal plants. America has shut down massive numbers of coal plants over the last 6 years due to economics, will not be building new coal plants, and is about to shut down many older coal plants due to EPA finally bringing fourth new regs.
BUT, China, India, South Africa, Russia, etc. continue to build massive new coal plants. These will exists for the next 25-50 years. They will NOT be shutdown. And all of them want to follow China's lead in leaving pollution control off, which will lead to massive new mercury/lead/etc emissions.
The neo-cons/tea* types will not be making changes. They will not look at science and admit that man is causing this. I suspect that they are simply lying to themselves, but at the least, it indicates a real lack of intelligence.
HOWEVER, when the liberals acknowledge that there is a problem and then focus not only a relatively small player, but ignore the major emitter and the fact that 3rd world nations are building new plants at a rate that is mind blowing, well, it shows that liberals are just as foolish, if not worse, than the above neo-cons/tea*.
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If you are ascribing moral and ethical rationale to any UN actions then you have not been observing the UN very closely. They are if anything, the antithesis of moral, ethical and rational. ALL of the UN's actions are based on petty politics. If you believe otherwise, you're being foolish.
Re: the ones to blame are the 350.org, etc (Score:3)
They are incorrect. (Score:5, Funny)
Woman is as much to blame. In fact I see more tiny little blonde women driving Hummer H2's and Escalade XLT's alone than any other vehicle.
Blaming ALL this on men and not pointing the finger at women, the ones that are the real cause of global warming is Sexist.
Women are ALWAYS bitching about how cold it is, it's a fricking conspiracy, they have been trying to raise the temperatures for generations.
It won't matter how many reports they make (Score:3)
Look at the IPCC track record first (Score:5, Interesting)
Before implementing a global carbon tax maybe the IPCC predictions should be looked at more closely, no?
The IPCC first assessment report(still available on their site) had temperature projections that we can compare today to see how they match reality nearly 25 years later. Take a look for yourself, and they clearly predict a warming of 0.5C from 1990 temperatures by 2014 IF CO2 emissions remained frozen at 1990 levels. So, sort of their best case scenario. In reality, CO2 emissions have steadily climbed much, much higher than 1990 levels. Today's temperatures though sit at a warming of 0.4C higher than 1990 levels.
The IPCC more recent third assessment from 2001 has much improved projections, and we can again compare them to reality 15 years out. The 2001 assessment has error bars included and a decade more research and refining behind it. If you compare it as well, you see today's temperatures DO fit within the error bars projected 15 years ago by the IPCC, albeit barely. Of course, they are way, way down on the lowest end of the error bars.
What the above tells me is that reality has shown the IPCC has consistently been overestimating the amount of warming to be expected. In other words, the science says don't panic just yet.
Switching to electric cars and nuclear power are a good idea regardless of CO2 emissions, so we should push forwards with them. If for no other reason than they are simply better and cheaper if we invest in them properly. A massive reduction in CO2 emissions that comes with it is entirely secondary as a side benefit. Really, less coal smoke and exhaust fumes are probably the bigger win. Particularly in places like China were even seeing the sun is become rare indeed.
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Oh, and don't forget to use a five year running average as in here [nasa.gov]. You can see the global five year running average temperature in 1990 was 0.3 C above the baseline; in 2000 it was about 0.8. You can also see the five year average oscillates above and below the underlying rising trend. If you use a piece of paper to cut off the graph at 1950, it looks like global temperatures are falling. In fact in the 50s global cooling was the scientific consensus, but that's coincidentally where the first contrari
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"mining existing CO2 out of the atmosphere somehow"
Such as extracting it from the atmosphere, or taking it directly from power plant emissions, compressing it into a liquid, and using it for enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org] of otherwise unproductive oilfields. The CO2 displaces the oil, and also greatly increases its viscosity.
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Uh.. what do you plan to do with the oil you extract?
Re:stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh.. what do you plan to do with the oil you extract?
Oil has a relatively flat demand curve. So the oil produced through CO2 displacement would mostly replace oil from conventional oil fields, resulting in a net reduction in atmospheric CO2.
I think the point you are trying to make, is that if a solution is not 100% perfect, then it is better to just do nothing. Whatever.
America has plenty of depleted oilfields, while most conventional oil is produced overseas. So by shifting production, enhanced production by CO2 displacement can strengthen our economy, generate jobs for Americans, and weaken repressive governments in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.
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Re:Can we quit publishing about the IPCC? (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, the thing is, that unlike your average slashdot reader the people at the IPCC actually RTFA so are allowed to have an opinion.
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...they reach the conclusions they are paid to reach by finding published literature that supports those conclusions
Ah, finally! A rational viewpoint here...
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i don't know what it means to "worship the invisible hand" - this sounds like a vague masturbation reference. But I do believe that if we are to mitigate the impact of global warming we need to provide solutions that work in a free market. put it another way, we need to help clean technology companies make a buttload of money and help people save money by using clean energy. (disclosure: I work for a clean technology company)
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Informative)
To worship the Invisible Hand means to believe that the free market always comes up with the best solutions for humanity, i.e. that it is a silver bullet rather than a tool which - like any tool - sometimes is suitable and sometimes is not. This is the same way some people answer every problem with "God!" even though God is just something humans make up for their own benefit and which as a concept has sometimes helped humanity (some of the most productive civilisations have been theistic) and sometimes has not.
We do need to promote economically sustainable solutions, yes. But that's not the same as providing solutions "that work in a free market", which has never existed. Many of the big tech developments of C19 (including in the USA) were based on temporary monopoly rights and public investments and guarantees which made remaining private investment worthwhile, for example. Government contributions, at least initially, are as essential to long-term R&D as they always have been. It's up to the voter whether they want to hand control over to profit-makers or to keep things under public control after that - and the most successful countries tend to choose a combination of public companies and well-regulated private industry, i.e. which suit no freshman idealist but which keep the average man/woman in the best possible living conditions.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone not woowoo anti-science (usually being the theistic types who worship the Invisible Hand) has already established:
1. Climate change is mostly man-made;
2. This doesn't mean the world's about to end, but we aren't doing enough to prevent significant harm.
I believe that you aren't being fair to the "theistic types" in that you aren't being nearly hard enough on those who are taking advantage of them and those who are similarly gullible. Those cocksuckers are, of course, the energy industry. They have a huge interest in not changing things. Their businesses are hugely profitable. Spending money to avoid the erosion of those profits is part of that business. Spending as little as possible in order to preserve as much profit as possible is just good business, and right now, hoodwinking the gullible has the most ROI. I have seen it before....
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a town where every third job was directly related to the forest products industry. All my life, I watched huge swaths of ancient forest fall to clear cutting, knowing that the industry's party line, "Trees are America's Renewable Resource", was just so much cynical corporate bullshit. Planting "four trees for every tree 'harvested'" is not the same thing as growing even one board-foot of timber for every board-foot harvested. But the locals bought it, hook-line-and-sinker, because they wanted to. They needed to believe that their livelihoods were derived from a resource that would always be there. Fast forward forty years, or so. All the old-growth timber is long gone. Countless towns like mine are now ghost towns, "the mill" long closed and most of the forest jobs (fellers, choker setters, etc.) also gone. And the locals are still wondering what happened, while a cynical few, who reaped huge profits from the rape of a resource that can not be replaced in several of our lifetimes, could not give a shit. And the "intellectual elite", those credible experts, including most ironically, a handful of industry foresters, who predicted this can only say, "We told you so."
This same thing is happening now on a global scale WRT climate change. The opinion amongst those most qualified to cast one is overwhelming, dwarfed only by the noise from those whose profit is threatened by that opinion. And those whose livelihood, indeed, those whose very lifestyle depends on the industries that produce those profits, want very badly to believe all the noise. Based on my experience, they will continue to do so until it is far too late to do anything about it.
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I have no illusions about the oil industry's "benevolance" but here's the thing.
If we were to suddenly withdraw the 160 exajoules of energy from the world's energy budget provided by oil, you could pretty much guarantee the death of at least 6 billion people over the course of a year.
Our food industry, and interdependent supply chains are critically dependent on cheap, high energy density transportation fuel and the infrastructure that supports it.
*Some* of that be replaced, eventually. It'll be expensive,
Re:Obviously...Not (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The lumber Industry was killed by the EPA and their Spotted Owl nonsense.
This is categorically false. The spotted owl "nonsense" did not eve slow down the "harvesting" of old growth timber. Two things killed the timber industry:
[citation needed] ...because you clearly do no know what you are talking about.
In other words, you have fallen for the same timber industry bullshit. What you are going to find, if you even bother to look is an impressive number of "re-forested" acres. Big fucking deal. An acre of Douglas fir saplings is not the same thing as an acre of mature forest, nor will it ever be so, given the industry's current practices.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
And who outsources everything to those countries? Hrm....
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is not a "political decision", but you're right that China and India are great contributors toward the problem. Are you implying that we should stop outsourcing everything to China and India? If so, I agree.
Re:Obviously. (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is not a "political decision",
But the UN is not a gathering of scientists; it's a gathering of politicians, and as such they make political announcements. As a political body with 1 vote per country, pretty much all they ever do is call for redistribution of wealth, and that directly motivates any muddled reading of science that you'll get from them.
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You have your opinion about which scientists have valid opinions, I have mine. Thus we part ways. Compelling data requires no advocates - e.g. I went quickly from scoffing at dark matter to believing the WIMP model whole-heartedly based on the CMBR data, which had nothing to do with the opinion of any given scientist. Such data may yet emerge for a particular climate model that stands out from the crowd, but as yet none have distinguished themselves even from the null hypothesis.
On a fundamental level why do you trust your judgement more than the people whom have been studying it full time for years or decades?
Do you think them to be incompetent? Unethical? It just strikes me as exceptionally arrogant to place so much faith in your own reasoning that you'd completely discount the opinions of one of the smartest and most honest groups on the planet.
And to be honest if you talked about Mullis because also buy into AIDS denialism then you need to step back and seriously reassess how y
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It's the pre-emptive dirty debating tactic of getting in first and accusing somebody else of what you yourself are doing so that their accusations look like "no you did that not me" playground arguments.
You see it a lot from the science denial crowd and others with no shame.
They also like to go on about the money spent on climate science as funding propaganda when the reality is wandering science deniers on lecture tours are making more money than any Nobel prize winning
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'll bite. Let's look at a few of what major environmental movements actions were around in the general ballpark of 1914 (let's say, 1910 to 1920) which met controversy from industry. Tell me which of them you think weren't in the right.
Let's first remember that the first real "conservationist president", Theodore Roosevelt, had just served, and taken vast swaths of land away from industrial interests. Lumber interests especially despised him. George Bird Grinnell had just made hunters mad by banning the killing of buffalo and limiting hunting / fur rights in many areas. But let's get to 1910-1920, by the time which a solid "green lobby" had managed become a powerful force in congress. What wins did those eco-nuts manage to pull off?
Establishment of Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Haleakala, Hawaii Volcanoes, Lassen Volcanic, Denali, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks. Most of which met with industry resistance, sometimes major. They'd been trying to make Grand Canyon a national park, for example, since 1882, but it encountered so much resistance that it took 37 years to achieve; its success was considered one of the greatest successes o the conservation movement at the time.
Protection of the most magificent forests of the US. 1914 was the year that famous conservationist John Muir died. It's largely due to his efforts and those who worked with him, for example, that logging of the Giant Sequoias was mostly stopped. The logging industry, one of the biggest in the US at the time, was not amused.
The New York State Audubon Plumage Law banned the sale of plumes of wild birds in the state in 1910 - birds had been widely killed left and right for the fashion industry, and you better believe that the (sizeable) NYC fashion industry fought against that one. But they lost. And by the end of the decade, 12 more states had passed similar laws. Those eco-nuts in the new Audubon Society also got the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 passed, against hunting and fashion interests. It passed a limited but still major earlier victory, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913.
So, do you think the world would be a better place with the American Buffalo extinct, over half a dozen fewer popular national parks, all of the large sequoias gone, and countless local bird species exinct? Oh, but the economic impact all of those eco-nuts were causing back then, why won't someone please think of the economy...
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Right, because when people want action on climate change, they're somehow not doing it to stop the extinction of species and save natural landscapes? Really?
And really, oygenation agents are your boogieman here? Guess what? They *do* reduce emissions. The use of oygenation agents has roughly contributed as much to reducing non-CO2 emissions as tighter emissions standards on cars, give or or take depending on the emission in question. The reduction in mileage isn't because you burn more gasoline, it's simply
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Re:Obviously. (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't wait for a doctor to be 99.99% sure about the day you will die before accepting any treatment, you trust that they will make a good guess based on limited observations they have.
I encourage all climate denialists to get at least 4, maybe 5-sigma certainty on any cancer diagnosis before taking any action. Cancer treatments are expensive after all, and you should wait until you're really, really, super duper extra sure you have it!
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Interesting)
About 50% of China's pollution is caused by exports.... so all that cheap crap you buy that's made in China counts towards China's pollution. The corporations have not only outsourced all the jobs to China, but the pollution too.
The pollution from shipping the junk from China (boats and planes) isn't tallied in any accounts so total pollution is more.
So, the pollution drifting over San Francisco is just the pollution catching up with the stuff shipped over and sitting on WalMart shelves.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you know China's having a serious economic crisis because the era of outsourcing is dying? You're fighting last century's battles, my friend. Manufacturing capacity in the US never really fell, it just became more automated (so the jobs went away, but not the output). As technological progress makes it cheaper to make things here with robots than in China with sweatshops, the tail end of manufacturing is coming back - and because of technology, you don't see the air anymore in most US cities.
Meanwhile, China and India are countries in their own right with their own economies. They're not some children whose deeds can be attributed to their parents in the US! They're going through the same technological revolution we did in the 1800s, though much faster and at 10x the scale. Their air pollution is about what ours was once - it's just that we've cleaned up our act so very much since then that even across an ocean their pollution is a significant portion of ours.
Over the course of this century, US and Europe and Japan are likely to fade as the leading economies. India, China, and Brazil (and to some extent Korea, but their population likely will stay small in comparison) will be the ones to watch, because as technology evens out it's all about population, and if you're worried about carbon emission or any other byproduct of economies, fix your attention there.
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why regulation and taxes are legitimate means towards solving the failures of market economics, like pollution.
And yet it consistently fails to accomplish anything other than squeezing the middle class, increasing poverty, and increasing income disparities. It never affects "the rich", it falls predominantly on the middle class, which has already suffered from globalization, job competition with 3rd world wages, and excessive regulation that protects the larger corporations and creates barriers for small businesses and sole proprietorships. Doubling-down on these policies simply ensures a neo-feudalism, a partnership between the corporate executives and the government bureaucracies, swapping positions with the revolving door of regulators and boards of directors of the regulated, and the lawmakers that pass laws that they write.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Did you know ~30% of San Francisco's air pollution was emitted in China?)
Well... 25% of US coal exports goes to Asia.
http://www.eia.gov/todayinener... [eia.gov]
U.S. coal exports have made steady inroads into the Asian market since 2007. Almost all the U.S. coal exported to Asia went to the world's top four coal importers: China, Japan, India, and South Korea. Asia's share of total U.S. coal exports increased from 2% in 2007 to 25% in 2012. While U.S. coal has also been gaining market share in Asia, it provided less than 4% of Asia's coal imports in 2012, and less than 1% of total coal consumed by the four large Asian importers.
And as natural gas pushes out coal in the US, that only means even more coal gets to be exported to Asia.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Hey, look at it this way.
USA gets cheap labor and ONLY a tiny fraction of pollution from its own coal.
Meanwhile, China pays USA for coal, keeps nearly all of the pollution from said coal, and exports cheap labor to USA.
USA gets cleaner air, cheap products and profit - while China gets cheap energy, much lesser profit and air and other pollution.
It's a win-win.
Mostly for USA, but it's a win-win.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, that's why the IPCC's 1990 and 1995 reports claimed to unequivocally detect AGW. If the IPCC were simply assessing AGW rather than uncritically promoting it, the IPCC might have said that they couldn't yet unequivocally detect AGW.
But they didn't, so Jane's right.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
"But if you know of a third option, I am all ears."
Third option: Non-carbon generated electricity that is cheaper than carbon. (That's an economic, as in real, 'cheaper', not tax/subsidy to make it cheaper)
"Why would it ignore China and India?"
Because the last one did, and if it hadn't have, they would have told us to go pound sand anyway. They are going to do what they want.
Let me tell you what they want. They want a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with central heat and air and 2 cars in the driveway. Each. Do the
Re:Obviously. (Score:4, Insightful)
Third option: Non-carbon generated electricity that is cheaper than carbon. (That's an economic, as in real, 'cheaper', not tax/subsidy to make it cheaper)
So, modern nuclear power it is. Start mass producing CANDU reactors (CANDU 6es and ACR-1000s) around the world while pushing ahead with research to convert them to using Thorium so we never run dry. Put them everywhere that needs power and that can't use geothermal. Standardize on common-sense, workable regulations (starting with eliminating any stupid anti-reprocessing rules) and plow through any NIMBY BS put up by local ignorant fools. Within 20 years, you'll have replaced all fossil fuel electricity production with something that actually works and provides plenty of power for everyone.
So the cheap electricity option is not even really an option, is it?
Sure it is. It requires a huge up-front cash investment for construction, but running costs are quite low. Complete the work to replace other fuels with Thorium and you've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 years of power for the entire planet at current rates of use. Increase usage by two orders of magnitude and we're down to maybe 1,000 years if we never put another penny into energy R&D.
Oh darn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You go right ahead and reduce your standard of living all you want, if that's what your religion calls for. Hairshirts and self-flagellation? It's your trip, man. But it's not my trip. I want everyone in the world to bring their standard of living up to mine! Instead of making everyone poor, how about we make everyone rich?
For 150 years now, technological improvement has reduced the pollution associated with a given standard of living, and the labor, energy, and resources needed for that production, be
Re:2015 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We are trying to save the planet.
We're also trying not to dump our standard of living.
I hit this when there were just six posts, and someone had linked to a national geographic report [nationalgeographic.com] detailing how politically charged this IPCC report is. It's a complete farce. It has since been downmodded to oblivion. Completely ridiculous.
Re: (Score:3)
Remote Sensing Systems (which uses satellite data) shows that there's been 0.123K of warming per decade since 1980 [remss.com].
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Obviously. (Score:4, Funny)
Nope, this is a HOAX, there is no such thing as an atmosphere or oceans !! This is all a hoax set up by the IPCC and a worldwide conspiracy of climate scientists aiming to tax and take away the guns of the hard working US citizen!!
Re: (Score:3)
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Informative)
And a slight drop since 1997. [woodfortrees.org] If you look at RSS, it was essentially flat from 1979 to 1996, then the big 1998 spike happened, then flat since then. It's not really an increasing trend, but a flat/stable with a single big step function that happened in 1998. If it was driven by man, we'd expect to see a relatively consistent, ongoing rise, wouldn't we? Rather than two basically flat/declining periods with one big step function year between...
Oh, you mean like so? http://woodfortrees.org/plot/r... [woodfortrees.org]. What does that remind me of?
Oh, yeah, The Escalator [skepticalscience.com] - "Global Warming" is nothing but long periods of stagnant temperatures with ignorable jumps in between, right?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Satellites "measure" temperature of nebulous areas of the atmosphere based on a model of microwave emissions of gases (primarily 02 I think). From that they calculate a temperature. Satellites have to make adjustments for a number of things. Orbital variation, degradation of the instruments, the angle of view of the surface, effects on the microwave emissions by clouds and the background being measured against, land elevation rising into the area of the atmosphere being measured and probably several othe
Re:My mama told me, you better shop around. (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to accuse the HadCRUT team of fudging the numbers, hence your putting "adjustments" in scare quotes, kindly provide evidence.
Your choice of loolking at tropical temperatures and excluding polars is utterly disingenuous.
Re: (Score:3)
I know one thing: if our C02 levels go up, gardening and farming gets a whole lot easier. It's common practice to pump CO2 into greenhouses in order to optimize growth of tomatoes, peppers, etc...
Ironic that they complain about "greenhouse gasses". Humankind's perfect answer to this problem is to for everyone to plant a garden. That will not only make us healthier but will have an actual effect on our relationship to the "energy crisis", resulting in a lot less transportation of goods.
Re: (Score:2)
The fail is the word, "probably."
Not even close. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
U do realize that most r&d in this arena originated in america. Right? And that america continues to outspend both Europe and China on it?
[Citation needed], CNN certainly says otherwise: http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/12/... [cnn.com]
Also what political commitments have you been making? I haven't heard any, that are even remotely as impressive as the Europeans.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
What the *fuck* are you talking about? There's plenty of stuff that can be done. The only reason that they're not being done is that the wealthy would have to foot the bill, and they don't want to.
Re: (Score:3)
No matter how hard you bang the drums of class warfare, we're still not going to get to zero emissions by 2100.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Regular people aren't the ones clamoring to do nothing about climate change.
Yes, they are. The businesses who sell them things are keenly aware of what regular people want and are willing to pay for. Regular people don't want to pay $15 for a gallon of gas, have their taxes hugely increased, have their job go away, have their food become wildly more expensive, and have the economy crippled so they can be seen Doing The Right Thing in a country of 300 million people, while billions of people doing a whole lot of last-century-style polluting don't do anything along the same lines, thus making the economic wreckage even worse.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:4)
Exactly right. What regular people want is feast on cheap oil and gas and cheap food, and give a big "fuck you" to the next generation.
No, what they want is to not be the chumps that cripple their own economy for NO IMPACT on the climate while populations several times their size and polluting more every minute just carry on as usual.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, who said we have to return to 1700s lifestyles to go carbon-neutral? We just have to change what all that stuff runs on, it's not that difficult or expensive.
WRONG unless you count China, india, russia... (Score:3)
The fact is that China ALONE accounts for 30% of all emissions. Their per capita is above most of Europes (not Germany and eastern europe), and will exceed America in the next 3 years.
Likewise, Russian, India, and South Africa are building massive new coal plants that will exists for decades to come.
The ones that need to make changes is ALL OF US. And the hardest one will not be the west, but China, India, Russia, and South Africa.
Re:Adapt or Die (Score:5, Informative)
Since noone (except possibly you) believes that we're going to lose all land within 150km of the coasts in the next 50 years, your argument is, to put it bluntly, stupid.
Predicted sea level rise over the rest of this century (~85 years, not 50) is low enough that the routine level maintenance around New Orleans (a city that basically sits at or below sea level) will easily handle the problem. I'd imagine we could teach the stupider people of the world how to manage building a levee a whole 30cm tall within the frightfully short interval of 85 years, don't you think?
Note: arguing AGW is usually interesting, but some arguments are just plain idiotic....
Re: (Score:3)
Each year, about 15% of the US population move. That means that after less than 20 years, the equivalent of the entire population of the US has moved. Does this cause people to become homeless refugees? No, of course not. Sea level rise is so slow relative to natural migration that it has never mattered and will never matter.
Re: (Score:3)
Glad you asked. Probably about half a dozen times so far. Of course, it's done incrementally and in place, and some of the structure is reused, so you don't usually notice.
For example, in 2013 dollars, the Empire State Building cost about $630M. The owners started a renovation in 2008 that costs nearly the same amount. If Manhattan wouldn't be a good place for this kind of building anymore, people would skip the renovation and just build somewhere else.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Secondly, America's 2013 per capita emissions was in 15, not 18. Heck, in this written for 2012, , they show that America was at 16.4, while EU was 7.4, and china was at 7.1. [www.pbl.nl]
In 2013, America's per capita went down into the 15, while China went up to 8's and EU edged upwards. So, total BS from you.
Third, I notice no links from you. I
Re:When in doubt... (Score:4, Insightful)
The IPCC gains its data from researchers. You're just repeating the tired "scientists are an evil cabal" line that anti science goons have been invoking for over a century when science dares question some sacred belief.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere the more negative effects we see. Therefore reducing greenhouses gasses is a good thing, that will also preserve long chain hydrocarbons for more important uses.
Or do you also believe in magical infinite oil that will continue being brought to the surface like some sort of inverted manna?
Re:I'll believe that *you* believe it when I see i (Score:4, Insightful)