Billions Face Risks From Climate Change 659
gollum123 writes with a link to a kind of grim BBC story. According to a report drawn up by 'hundreds of international environmental experts', billions of people face drought and famine, as well as an increase in natural disasters, as a result of climate change. Individuals in the poorest countries face the most danger, due to a lack of infrastructure and geographic location. "The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world. Eighty-nine percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world. Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft."
There was an article in the Oregonian about this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How soon before the world blows up? (Score:1, Informative)
bull.. we have millions of years of ice cores.. (Score:4, Informative)
here is a sample of that data charted [daviesand.com]
Re:How soon before the world blows up? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Big mirror (Score:2, Informative)
Technology is not going to come to our rescue on this one, Slashdot. The sine qua non of all engineering is first fully understanding the problem, and we're nowhere close to that point. Our only guide then, is the past. There is an incontrovertible link between our industrial activity, atmospheric CO2 levels, and global warming--do not let the partisans on this site, or anywhere else, convince you otherwise. We need to cut our emissions and general ecological profile to levels more closely resembling a long, long time ago if we are to have any hope of averting this catastrophe.
Re:And the upsides? (Score:4, Informative)
the refrigerator : P (Score:2, Informative)
so, in all honesty, theyll get it from the refrigerator : )
No disagreement about a scientific issue? (Score:2, Informative)
YouTube abridged documentary [youtube.com]
Torrent of full documentary [mininova.org]
Please don't hurt my karma too bad, I just think it's nice to consider all sides of an issue.
Heart,
Your Mom
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No disagreement about a scientific issue? (Score:5, Informative)
Watched that? Good.
Now remember that MIT oceanographer? The one they've got on there to say that CO2 doesn't matter because it all comes out of the oceans really anyway?
He was substantially misrepresented, and he's not happy at all [mit.edu] about it. I'm especially amused by the manner in which the film maker responds to criticism: 'Go and fuck yourself.'
Re:Cost-Benefit Analysis (Score:3, Informative)
Talk about 100 trillion dollar project!
It would be better to start shutting down coal plants and put that money into developing an infrastructur for charging electric cars.
Stop selling combustion engine vehicals.
Exeptions:
Tractor Trailor trucks, emergency vehicals, cargo planes, planes for overseas travel.
This needs to be done globally.
Does it suck? yes it does. For the record I Love combustion cars. I love the power the speed, driving long distance between refuelling. I get all tingly just tlaking about it.
eventually it will be the norm to uses video conferncing for all sales calls, slow sprawl, creat new industries, destroy some old industries, and the market will go on.
The quikest way is to put a dollar a gallon tax on all gas. That dollar goest to two places:
Education and RnD for new power sources. It would eb a temporary boon and used with that in mind
For education, it should go into High School and into making colleges cheaper.
Increase the tax by 50 cents every year for five years.
I lke my lifestyle, but what I like doesn't matter when the whole of society is at risk.
There is going to be less rain in places.
NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the chart (Score:2, Informative)
interesting how you ignore the huge spike that nearly hits the top of that chart at the '00 mark, defying that normal schedule completely.
looks like someone failed their macro and finance courses, and doesnt pay attention at all.
economic growth is directly related to money supply, inflation is also, but with a timelag, this is the reason the government has to raise interest rates and sell bonds when inflation starts to peak, and lowers rates and buys bonds whenever economic growth flags... it's to control the money supply through control of the cost of lending and how much the government competes with individuals and business for those same lending dollars.
finally, if you cant google up any evidence showing co2 results in increased atmospheric heat retention, you have problems
Re:those "several delegations" should *#$ themselv (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
The "Club of Rome" models were available, too. Yet their predictions of global disaster from overpopulation and pollution didn't come to pass.
At the time it took a mainframe surrounded by "priests in white coats" to run the models. With the advent of personal computers and broad programming education the models were run by people not part of the "club": They tracked the historical record up to the release date then diverged drastically.
So their guts were examined and they were found to have built-in assumptions that were flat out false (to the point that some consider them to be rigged).
The biggest false assumptions related to technology and invention: Major inventions were modeled as dated switch functions. Of course these all stopped at the date of the work - implying no future inventions. (And how WOULD you predict invention?) Increase in the use of technology was assumed to proportionally increase pollution, and so on.
(In fact what happened was technology continued to improve, and pollution was minimized in the process: Combustion was optimized - eliminating energy lost creating nitrogen oxides and "acid rain". Scrubbers pulled sulfur, ash, and other garbage from stacks - and they were sold as feedstocks for other processes - building material, chemical processing, etc. Recaptured sulfur alone would have paid for the equipment investment if it hadn't driven the price down to the point that sulfur mining essentally ended - another environmental benefit.
The new global warming models may be more honest. For starters, they don't track the historical record, which implies that they weren't tweaked to produce the desired result. B-) But it will take a while for the rest of the world to run them, examine them, and see whether they have flaws.
Meanwhile (like the Club of Rome's models) the agencies funding their development have an incentive to produce "scientific predictions" that can serve as an excuse for increased governmental power. Even if this doesn't bias the awarding of contracts, the perception that it might may affect the work of researchers. The models already say what the funding agencies want, so don't expect the
The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate.
So? The human contribution to CO2 is miniscule compared to the natural emissions. Water vapor is a far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide and the water vapor content of the atmosphere swings wildly. Water condensed into clouds and fog is an even greater modulator of solar input.
Climate is complicated. There's no reason to assume that a miniscule push given by one aspect of human activity is the cause of any observed change in temperature - even if the change happens to be in the direction of the push.
Meanwhile those models don't match the historical record. Some particulars if interest:
- CO2 rise LAGS (by a considerable amount) global temperature.
- Global temperature tightly tracks sunspot activity (without significant lag).
(Can you tell me how CO2 "pollution" affects sunspots?) IMHO this is more consistent with the idea that the sun is the major controller of global temparature, with CO2 levels primarily an effect rather than a cause - driven by the reduced solubility of CO2 in warmer ocean water (which only changes temperature on millennial time scales).
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong,
We're on the same page there.
but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
When it comes to making policy that involves massive government intervention in economic activity and private lives - from crashing economies through taxing fuels into unavailability to mandating types of light bulbs - the burden of proof that there really IS a "disease" worse than the "cure" is on those who want to seize the power and use it to make the intervention.
Al Gore..... (Score:2, Informative)
Pepole would probably pay much more attention to him if he wasn't so over-hyped and politicized. That, and he could give himself more credit if he practiced all the crap he preaches.
Al Gore, Media Whore.
Re:As a Canadian I have to DISAGREE (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just the coast, it's all over the interior too. And you don't need a plane ride to see it - check out google maps satellite view:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=vancouver&ie=UTF8&z
Just unbelievable. Every single little "patch" you see there is a half kilometer long by half to full kilometer wide. I wonder how many citizens and politicians have seen just exactly how extensive it is.