CO2 Levels Likely To Stay Above 400PPM For The Rest of Our Lives, Study Shows (inhabitat.com) 331
An anonymous reader writes: A new study from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere are likely to remain above 400 parts per million (ppm) for many years. Specifically, scientists forecasted that levels would not dip below 400pm in "our lifetimes." The CO2 concentrations of "about 450ppm or lower are likely to maintain warming below 2 degrees Celsius over the 21st century relative to pre-industrial levels." However, lead author on the paper Richard Betts said we could pass that number in 20 years or less. In an article on The Guardian, he said even if we reduce emissions immediately, we might be able to delay reaching 450ppm but "it is still looking like a challenge to stay below 450ppm." El Nino has played a significant role in climbing carbon dioxide levels, but it's likely we'll see higher CO2 levels than the last large El Nino storm during 1997 and 1998 because "manmade emissions" have risen by 25 percent since that storm, according to The Guardian. Met Office experts predicted in November 2015 that in May 2016 "mean concentrations of atmospheric CO2" would hit 407.57ppm -- the actual figure was 407.7ppm. The NOAA reported during 2015 that the "annual growth rate" of CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 3.05ppm. NOAA lead scientist Pieter Tans said, "Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years. It's explosive compared to the natural processes."
The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:5, Insightful)
The science is in, the numbers are not fake, this is not a hoax. This is going to have serious global repercussions and it will never go away. We can't even yet stop contributing to the acceleration of emissions, they CONTINUE to grow year by year despite much-touted international accords. The science community agrees this will not be enough, and we are failing at this course correction necessity.
At some point, the people being paid and those paying millions to put out the unreasonable position that this all is "no big deal" or "not certain to be a problem" or "not caused by human industry" etc, those people have to be dealt with. I make no suggestions beyond that general observation, that this is untenable.
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Eat them?
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Laugh at them.
Re:The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is kind of my point... that the people that do care about trying to mitigate global warming damages won't make a spot of difference. Their caring *is* no better than doing absolutely nothing, while at least the latter has merit in that you don't end up worrying about something you have absolutely no ability to control or change.
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I'm not convinced you care about the future either. There are much more important problems than global warming such as overpopulation, poverty, destruction of arable land, habitat destruction, corruption of human society, nuclear proliferation, and environmental pollution. A key problem with climate change mitigation is that these greater problems are routinely compromised for token efforts in climate change mitigation.
No, the key problem here is don't understand the wide range of consequences and impacts climate change will have. Overpopulation is an issue that will be made much worse by climate change (migration). Poverty will be made worse by climate change. Arable land destruction will be made worse (already seeing some of that and it's only going downhill from there). Habitat destruction will be worse (goes without saying). So on and so forth.
Humans are terrible when it comes to assessing long range threats. Most peo
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Population growth is not leading to more CO2.
Industrialization with the wrong energy production technology is. China overtaking the US in CO2 production around 2005 was not during a jump in population, but in a jump of burning coal to create electricity.
I doubt that the planet is right now still experiencing a significant growth anyway.
And bottom line, with what lever would a western nation be able to limit population growth in a developing country? We don't buy/produce clothes from Bangladesh anymore? To p
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Population growth is not leading to more CO2. Industrialization with the wrong energy production technology is.
Fossil fuels are only the "wrong" energy production technology precisely because so many people use them.
I doubt that the planet is right now still experiencing a significant growth anyway.
The world is currently adding 80 million people a year. That's the current population of the US in a bit over four years.
And bottom line, with what lever would a western nation be able to limit population growth in a developing country? We don't buy/produce clothes from Bangladesh anymore? To punish them for growing? Or do we sent in shock troops and kill everyone with more than 2 children? I wonder how much CO2 such surgical strikes would "cost"?
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible
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Fossil fuels are only the "wrong" energy production technology precisely because so many people use them.
Nope. It is by default.
Does not matter if 7 billion people use it for 100 years or 1 billion people use it for 700 years.
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible
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overpopulation isn't an issue
Overpopulation is the only reason we have anthropogenic global warming in the first place.
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Not even close to being true. Amazing.
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Not even close to being true. Amazing.
You don't have to be a complete dumbshit here. The current per capita consumption rate wouldn't be serious, if there was a tenth the number of people on Earth. It's not fossil fuels that are the problem, but rather that there are well over seven billion people burning fossil fuels that are the problem.
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Global warming is mostly caused by a mere 800 million people on this planet.
Most of the growth in CO2 emissions doesn't come from the 800 million people.
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sanity means doing something about it instead of not doing something because youre scared of the precedent of making the world a better place to live.
the only one peddling hysteria here is you.
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None of those problems (except maybe nuclear proliferation) have the ability to end humanity forever.
Neither does global warming. Those doomsday scenarios are pure fiction not science. Humanity would have to try really hard for many centuries to kill itself off through CO2 poisoning.
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Seeing as your very first quote is cherry-picked from a paragraph which disagrees with your assertions, it's quite hard to take you seriously. You can disagree with the science if you wish, but it requires you to actually show how the science is flawed. Quoting Aldous Huxley and cherry-picking quotes from the IPCC isn't doing that. You suck at this, but I guess it's all you have.
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The science is in, the numbers are not fake, this is not a hoax. This is going to have serious global repercussions and it will never go away. We can't even yet stop contributing to the acceleration of emissions, they CONTINUE to grow year by year despite much-touted international accords. The science community agrees this will not be enough, and we are failing at this course correction necessity.
I agree with you, but what you fail to accept is that the changes required to actually fix the problem are simply not acceptable... at least the average person won't accept them until it gets a LOT worse.
Welcome to the human race, a collection of animals that are irrational and not at all Vulcan...
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"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." --Mahatma Ghandi.
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Concentration camps?
Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe if you paid attention to what the scientists have actually been saying instead of listening to hyperbolic ranters you would understand the actual time scale of the predictions.
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The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future. Something tells me those "scientists" are really snake oil salesman looking for grants who have as much credibility as those "scientists" doumenting water canals on mars in the 19th century.
And how do you know there aren't canals on Mars? Have you actually been there? Or do you base your implication that there are no Martian canals purely based on some kind of hearsay?
Hearsay from whom?
If only there were people whose job it was to gather evidence for or against ideas like Martian canals, and then argue each side until one becomes the clear winner.
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The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future. Something tells me those "scientists" are really snake oil salesman looking for grants who have as much credibility as those "scientists" doumenting water canals on mars in the 19th century.
Scientists may be looking at ~150 years of detailed temperature measurements but they're also looking at 100s of thousands of years if detailed ice core records and proxy data going back billions of years. They are not making predictions reaching thousands of years into the future except in a speculative way. Detailed projections based on plausible scenarios go out perhaps 100 years at most.
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And how can we be sure that these unanticipated effects make us underestimate the amount of warming we're going to be facing?
Oh, it might also get much hotter than the scientists expect? Let's not do anything then.
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Science is not about being sure. It's about doing the best we can with the evidence that's available. If the theory holds together without any gaping holes then it's unlikely there are any significant unanticipated factors but of course science is always subject to revision pending new evidence. But assuming there is something missing without any evidence that there is something missing is just wishful thinking.
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Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
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The field of risk management is all about making decisions about what to do when the possible outcomes are not clear. One of the tenets is the more uncertainty about a potentially bad outcome the more value there is in trying to avoid it.
Regarding climate change we can wait a few decades to better understand how bad it's going to be but if we do that there's no possibility of reversing course on a short enough time scale to make much difference. We will be committed at that point.
The restructuring is happ
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The field of risk management is all about making decisions about what to do when the possible outcomes are not clear. One of the tenets is the more uncertainty about a potentially bad outcome the more value there is in trying to avoid it.
No, it's not. That's the precautionary principle which is a self-contradictory idea. Risk management is merely what it says, the management of risks known and unknown. An obvious response to uncertainty is to try it out and find out what the risks are.
Regarding climate change we can wait a few decades to better understand how bad it's going to be but if we do that there's no possibility of reversing course on a short enough time scale to make much difference. We will be committed at that point.
Why would we want to reverse course? That's more harmful climate change. And we are already committed to something by the presence of well over seven billion people, many who are still reproducing at well above break even.
The restructuring is happening as we speak. The cost of renewable energy is on a course to be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in a decade or so. But we could be doing it faster to hopefully avoid some very negative outcomes.
Unless, of course, that happens to not
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You sum it up as "collecting more information" but you are actually calling for "do nothing, and if the current understanding is correct (which all the data seems to point to) the problem will get worse, but we should hope that *all* the evidence gathered up to now will be disproved somehow, and we can forget this ever happened". That is literally denying the problem, and denying the science. You can try to spin it as reasoned trepidation, but it's clear it's anything but.
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You sum it up as "collecting more information" but you are actually calling for "do nothing, and if the current understanding is correct (which all the data seems to point to) the problem will get worse, but we should hope that *all* the evidence gathered up to now will be disproved somehow, and we can forget this ever happened".
There are two things to note. I think there is a better strategy than merely doing nothing, but it primarily involves monitoring climate for a century or two to make sure we don't during the course of our normal business actually trigger any tipping points or similar problems.
Second, your data doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't have to be disproved. These gloomy climate predictions have been a parade of empty assertions, fallacies, and untested computer models from the beginning. And the pro
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Good thing there's a better approach then. We can merely wait a few decades and get better data than all that awesome data you mention. The future can't be faked. Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
Really? You never act on any evidence unless it's 100% certain, if and only if it's 100% certain? For health, profession, traveling, disease, safety, investments, anything? You never make estimates or take precautionary measures on anything? It's almost like you're insisting you only see things in black and white. I somehow very, very much doubt that.
Casting aside the science for a moment. I imagine nearly everyone, including you, is willing to take measured precautions to protect themselves even i
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No, they're not looking at 150 years of data. They're looking at tens of thousands of years of data. Do you even have the vaguest fucking idea what AGW research is based on?
Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:3, Insightful)
Only 150 years of direct measurement, and only about 35 of that being fairly comprehensive.
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This is not Insightful, this is bollocks.
We 150 years of direct measurement of temperature.
How useful is that? We have a few (hundred) thousand years of indirect measurement of temperature _and_ CO2 levels.
Fixed that small difference for you.
No one cares what temperature New York City had at the Central Park at 12:00 27th of december 1876.
Your idea is like fighting obesity by measuring peoples weight during they grow up from 0 to 18 years without ever putting it in relation to their actual size and body fi
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If you don't like what the data says do you automatically assume it's unreliable? For me the default is to consider it reliable in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary. A lot of people claim the data scientists are manipulating temperature data to support their science but they never look at the published papers that explain why and how the adjustments are being made and try to produce scientific evidence why those are invalid. Even when a group of (real) skeptics in the Berkeley Earth group to
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If the sample contains data spanning tens of thousands of years, then it is indeed tens of thousands of years of data in that sample. There are many samples made. Don't misrepresent the facts of the discussion, it's a terrible debate tactic and calls your honesty into question.
Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future.
Nope. The scientists are applying the physics of infrared heat transfer to the atmosphere of the Earth.
This is a pretty well known subject-- in fact, you have to have the greenhouse effect, or else the Earth would have an average temperature below freezing. We know the greenhouse effect of trace gasses in the atmosphere is real.
The denialists are basically saying "well, the physics of heat transfer may be well known, but when you apply it to the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere, somehow it's now different."
No, actually, it's not.
Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the people haven't been listening to the scientists. They've been listening to hyperbolic supporters and equally dishonest detractors. The scientists have always insisted that there are error bars built into their projections, but that all the projections agree that serious problems are coming. And serious problems are already here. The insurance industry knows AGW's effects are already happening. Scientists in various other fields like marine biology and oceanography know its happening. Even the Kochs know it's happening. For chrissakes, the Saudis have created the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know they'll be lucky to have another half century to pull profits out of the ground.
The only reason this game is being played out is so that the fossil fuel profiteers can milk a few more years out of that resource before solutions like carbon pricing are implemented on a large scale. But make no mistake, even the major oil companies have known for decades that the product they're pulling out of the ground is leading to major climatological changes.
At this point, what we're seeing is merely a pack of paid professional oil company shills who don't even have any credibility with their paymasters. Oh, and a bizarre gang of Liberarians who seem to believe that the Invisible Hand is capable of suppressing CO2's energy absorption and emission properties, because, you know, Communism!!!!!
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It's not the carbon dioxide he is hoping to evade.
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Capitalism. Any more questions?
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by definition it's a gradual problem that becomes out of control after a certain threshold.
No, that isn't the definition of global warming. The real definition is merely that that the mean global temperature of Earth is increasing. Existence of tipping points, gradualness, and thresholds are not part of the definition.
And of course, this being Slashdot, after posting your lame bullshit, you have to accuse me of being a moron. I applaud the adherence to form.
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But to the non-denialists it's like poetry.
In other words, scientific illiteracy rears its ugly head. I would suggest here that poetry is a terrible basis for global environmental policy and likely to get even worse in the future.
I was having trouble breathing. (Score:2)
Not if Kurzweil has anything to say... (Score:2)
CO2 Levels Likely to Stay Above 400PPM for the Rest of Our Lives
Umm, but Ray Kurzweil told me if I take 200 pills per day and survive to the Singularity (which, apparently, is coming soon to a neocortex near you), then I'll live forever. And so will you.
Does that mean CO2 levels will stay that high forever? Just wonderin'...
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Does that mean CO2 levels will stay that high forever? Just wonderin'...
Light a man a fire, and he will stay warm for a night. Set a man afire, and he will stay warm for a lifetime.
Nothing is forever. Besides the eventual death of the planet and the loss of the atmosphere, some other process will bring CO2 levels back down long before then. Whether homo sapiens or any of its descendants will be around to see it is the actual question.
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Easy now....what to do with people that cannot eat grain [like me]. Not talking about allergy - no glutamine bread is also no-no for me. However, without grain the efficiency of absorbing nutrients [at least in my case, but I have heard many similar stories] increases dramatically. My meat consumption is one or two [small, but high quality] dishes per week, two dishes per week fish and the rest is diary products and vegetables. It has become a bit of a party trick to tell people how little I eat while worki
My fellow Americans (Score:2)
greatest thing since (longitudinally) sliced bread (Score:2)
El Nino has played a significant role in climbing carbon dioxide levels
Wow, just when I thought I had heard global warming blamed on absolutely everything, and absolutely everything blamed on El Nino. But I never even considered blaming El Nino for carbon emissions.
Re:insightful and considered opinions expected (Score:5, Insightful)
The first post nailed it. Just take a look through the comments to see how incapable the /. crowd is at having a reasonable, intelligent discussion anymore. Off topic instantly, into political chest pounding immediately. Nothing about how burning fossil fuels is responsible for the constant rise in CO2 and the subsequent impacts on the biosphere and polar ice. Coral bleaching is reaching levels never seen before due to ocean acidification, which will get much worse as the CO2 level continues to rise. I understand it is the job of the corporate shills here to "muddy the waters" and manufacture doubt and insult everyone, but I just wish everyone else would stop taking the bait, and don't even respond to them anymore, no matter how obnoxious they are.
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Most of the current coral bleaching seems to be more caused by high ocean temperatures than acidification. Acidification may become important for bleaching coral in the future.
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Nice to see that someone hates me :) I think value is in the eye of the beholder. I guess some folks with mod points liked what I said. If you don't like what I'm saying then come up with some credible evidence to counter it.
When it comes to CO2 and its role in global warming no one has come up with any credible evidence to counter it. Lots of people try to claim it's the Sun or it's just natural cycles but the never present any solid evidence for their claims. Science is all about being able to back up
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The "hiatus" has been debunked over and over and over. That you would claim otherwise shows you either don't know what you're talking about, or that you're more than willing to lie to make a point. Neither is attractive. Pick one.
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Well considering the overwhelming consensus by professional chemists, biologists, and natural historians -- all who know more about the subject than you -- why should we take your word over theirs?
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I think it's pretty clear at this point that Trump will win the presidency. He isn't facing any real competition, and even many Democrats can't bring themselves to vote for either of the potential Democratic candidates. So at least a portion of them will be voting for Trump, in addition to nearly all Republicans who do support Trump. Much of America has become tired and disillusioned after 8 years of leftist rule, and want something different. That gives Trump a win that is nearly guaranteed at this point.
LOL, keep dreaming. There's an awful lot of Republicans who won't be voting for Trump.
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I think Mussolini is a more apt comparison.
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Only if the end of the story is a lifeless corpse swinging from a meat hook.
Trump's post-election fate is likely a fade into obscurity. He's destroyed his TV career, unless it's as a Fox News comedy set piece, and with all the Republicans walking away, I doubt even Fox is going to have much to do with him.
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I'm Donald Trump, and I approved this message.
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Why don't you go back to Europe?
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you're confusing a situation where Hillary had nothing to gain from viciously fighting Sanders head-on
Only the US Presidency. Let's review your post here. By your own words, we have Clinton struggling against a "non-entity".
Let us remember that she lost a number of states and didn't get enough votes for a definitive win until the California primary.
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Nope. The Democrat nominee will be selected by the superdelegates and the superdelegates don't want any change.
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Wrong. Hilary would have won if there were no superdelegates.
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Cause the Clinton years were just sooo bad.
what with that economic growth, budgetary surplus, a relatively stable economy, no wars....
That was just soo much worse than the years under Bush Jr....
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Now take the opposite of everything the AC said, and you'll have a statement much closer to reality.
Re:Good news for a change (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the holy book would be the IPCC reports. The nice thing about anthropogenic global warming as a religion is that it has actual scientific evidence to back it up. If you want to suggest that the primary cause is something other than human activity you need to come up with some actual scientific evidence of your own that holds up under scrutiny.
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ROTHFLMAO! The "leaked" emails were an exercise in quote mining and taking things out of context. The more you try to make them into something significant the more you look like a fool yourself.
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So you like to pretend.
However, its just not true.
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The only people who think the climategate emails were all that significant are the climate science deniers who have motivation to think so. They have nothing to combat science with actual science so the have to attack the practitioners of science instead.
Re: Good news for a change (Score:4, Interesting)
The medical term for what you're doing is called "projection".
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/... [factcheck.org]
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w... [ucsusa.org]
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/C... [rationalwiki.org]
The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to “hiding the decline” isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The “decline” actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.
The "trick," which was used in a paper published in 1998 in the science journal Nature, is to combine the older tree ring data with thermometer data. Combining the two data sets can be difficult, and scientists are always interested in new ways to make temperature records more accurate.
Tree rings are a largely consistent source of data for the past 2,000 years. But since the 1960s, scientists have noticed there are a handful of tree species in certain areas that appear to indicate temperatures that are warmer or colder than we actually know they are from direct thermometer measurement at weather stations.
"Hiding the decline" in this email refers to omitting data from some Siberian trees after 1960. This omission was openly discussed in the latest climate science update in 2007 from the IPCC, so it is not "hidden" at all.
Why Siberian trees? In the Yamal region of Siberia, there is a small set of trees with rings that are thinner than expected after 1960 when compared with actual thermometer measurements there. Scientists are still trying to figure out why these trees are outliers. Some analyses have left out the data from these trees after 1960 and have used thermometer temperatures instead.
Techniques like this help scientists reconstruct past climate temperature records based on the best available data.
Much has been made about emails regarding a certain paper that some scientists did not think should have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. These emails focus on a paper on solar variability in the climate over time. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal called Climate Research, but under unusual circumstances. Half of the editorial board of Climate Research resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process. The paper, which argued that current warming was unexceptional, was disputed by scientists whose work was cited in the paper. Many subsequent publications set the record straight, which demonstrates how the peer review process over time tends to correct such lapses. Scientists later discovered that the paper was funded by the American Petroleum Institute.
In a later e-mail, Phil Jones references two other papers he didn't hold in high esteem. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
Yet, the papers in question made it into the IPCC report, indicating that no restrictions on their incorporation were made. The IPCC process contains hundreds of authors and reviewers, with an e
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Don't get hyperbolic about it. Things will continue to change slowly and some years will be better than others but in 20 or 30 years you can look back and see that things have changed.
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No, it's just not verifiable on the short time scale you want to use. Tell me how nothing has changed in 30 years. (Actually you'll have to tell someone else, I'm old enough it's unlikely I'll be alive then.)
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Everyone who doesn't believe in our global warming religion is going to get cooked by it just as bad as those who do believe. It's an equal opportunity phenomenon.
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You realize how much like a doomsday religious preacher that sounded right?
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Of course I was just being snarky. But if you're not an old fart like me the reality of global warming and the concomitant climate change it causes will have a significant effect on your life whether you like it or not.
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You don't have to take my word for it. But you ignore the scientists word at your own peril.
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The IPCC reports are basically a compilation and review of the current literature in the field of climate science. When they come out they are already a year or two behind the most current science.
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Do you have any idea how big and long lasting the conspiracy would have to be to sustain your assertion? If they're good enough to keep it going for over 30 years for all scientists around the world you might as well give up.
And regarding bureaucrats the WG1 which is about the scientific basis for AGW is done by scientists, not bureaucrats.
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Not how funding or science works.
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You are right! Falsifiable science. Let's see how those disaster scenarios played out from 30 years ago... [reason.com]
Quoting that article, "But is that the whole story? I dove into the WABAC Machine known as Nexis and dredged up a couple of other news reports recounting Hansen's testimony. A longer June 1986 UPI story reported, "Unless steps are taken to control the problem, temperatures in the United States in the next decade will range from 0.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees higher than they were in 1958, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies." "
["0.5 degrees to 2 degrees" translates to
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Re:Like most of Earth's existence? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it has been under 1,000 ppm for the entire existence of humans.
But the real problem isn't the level of CO2 but how fast it is changing. If it slowly rose to 1,000 ppm over 10,000 years or more then life would have time to adapt. At the rate it's going it could hit 1,000 in less than 200 years and that's going to cause lots of disruption. It remains to be seen how well our civilization will cope with it.
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For the entirety of Human History up until the industrial revolution atmospheric CO2 level has fluctuated between 280 to 220 ppm. This planet hasn't seen 400pm of C02 in the atmosphere for millions of years. Long before the oldest Human ancestor species even existed. Our species was born of the ice ages that came about due to some of the lowest C02 levels the planet ever saw.
We are pushing C02 levels up to range that existed when dinosaurs were alive and there were tropical swamps in the arctic circle.
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We are pushing C02 levels up to range that existed when dinosaurs were alive and there were tropical swamps in the arctic circle.
In the summer perhaps. But I doubt it. In winter it is dark there, and cold. Regardless of CO2 levels. Perhaps not _that_ cold, but still freezing.
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Speculate much?
You see, thats why reasonable people dont buy into your scaremongering. These made up bullshit numbers like 1000 in less than 200 years...
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1000 ppm in less than 200 years assumes we continue BAU and don't do anything to curb our CO2 emissions. I actually expect we will come to our senses about it and will curb emissions. Maybe we can stop it around 600 ppm. But then you have to consider the emissions from melting permafrost and methane clathrates which we don't have a good handle on yet so it's hard to say what the maximum will be. The ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland didn't start forming until CO2 levels dropped below about 700 ppm.
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This, a million times this. Humans cannot think logarithmically, they are linear creatures. We always aim too high in the short term, and too low in the long term, since that is how nature lets us convert logarithms to linear problems.
In two hundred years we will be terraforming Mars, not worried about the paradise park called Earth. And we will be using 0.0001% of our resources to keep the entire planet "perfect", or whatever the guys in charge think is perfect. "Rain is on Tuesdays, people, close your
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Why are you bringing in facts to a political discussion?
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Who denies that life will find a way? Life found a way even when the cyanobacteria started belching toxic levels of oxygen.
And really, no one even questions that humans will survive, but it's a question of how much do we want it to cost us? Act now, and it's a lot less than if we wait fifty or sixty years, or really even twenty.
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Right now you're costing ME a lot, in the form of your retarded carbon taxes and other assorted annoyances.So why don't you sod off and start financing your religion with your own money?
The phrase for your attitude is "Penny wise and pound foolish". What is as several economic analyses have indicated it costs you twice as much to wait as it does to do something about it now?
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That works well for CO2 concentrations from about 50 years ago back to around 800,000 years ago. Before that you have to use proxies that are less exact.
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You have yet to bring any scientific evidence to the argument. I will say that my 50 years comment may have been optimistic.
But here are some links to ice core research with scientific data:
800,000-year Ice-Core Records of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) [ornl.gov]
Historical Carbon Dioxide Record from the Vostok Ice Core [ornl.gov]
Data for Historical CO2 Record from the Vostok Ice Core [ornl.gov]
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Doesn't a warmer climate equal more women in bikinis? Doesn't more CO2 equal more plants? I always thought that planting groves of giant sequoias would be a good way to sequestering CO2. I think I remember reading that each sequoia is capable of sequestering like 2,000 tons of CO2 for 3,000 years.
I came to ask the same question. One side affect of more CO2 is that some plants will grow a lot more easily, and hence absorb some of the CO2.
I also hear more energy more more moisture in the air, so more rain and yet again more plants.
So yeah, some humans might cop a raw deal, but it sounds like AGW could be a net win for a lot of other species. The hippies should be all for this.
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Yes.
But your cooling bill is about to go through the roof.
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All you said is "I don't understand this!". Thanks for trying to play.
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BTW which exemptions and subsides are you taking about? The ones everyone quotes are generic ones every business gets so why should energy companies not get them?