Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds 1061
Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."
Failure of logic (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. I hope the paper is not as inane as her quotes. There's a difference between passive conservation and active geo-engineering. What Solomon is trying to say is that even if we all hold hands and try to conserve that it'll make no difference because the damage is already done. Of course, to acknowledge this is difficult if you buy into environmental conservationism, as Solomon obviously does, so you end up with quotes like "I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it".
Re:Failure of logic (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OOOK (Score:1, Interesting)
If I had points I would mod you both up
Positive feedback loops. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not surprised. I have been pondering the various, strong positive feedback loops involved with climatic phenomena, like the release of gigantic amounts of methane from the Siberian permafrost due to warming, the decrease of vitality and eventual death of plankton in the oceans (main source of oxygen for the planet, as well as main source of food for fish) due to increased sea temperatures, decrease of albedo due to melting of icecaps and glaciers, decrease of rainfall and consequent decrease of forests (that the Indonesian and Amazonian forests have been mercilessly burnt, doesn't help), to mention just a few. I am sure the better informed reader can add a few more of these positive feedback loops, but in my humble opinion, these are the stronger ones, and make the process of global warming unstoppable.
Re:Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit" :)
Re:OOOK (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nothing New (Score:3, Interesting)
>>The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.
Or a man in the future, if government totally breaks down, and man enters a "state of war", in which man turns against brother, and reason itself is overthrown. Or something along those lines.
It's relevant to the discussion, since if we're doomed to Malthusian overpopulation (which we're not, but stipulating the point...) then at a certain point, people will enter a state of war as masses of people start starving to death.
Sounds Reasonable (Score:3, Interesting)
The headline is a little alarmist, but the article is more reasobable:
One of the things people don't understand about science sometimes is that it doesn't set policy because it requires objectivity. Goals, which are the basis of judgement and therefore decision making, are subjective.
You ignore... (Score:3, Interesting)
As we currently do not have correct antidotes against these diseases, I call your bluff.
And they were probably correct (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they were right (about the coming ice age).
During the "mini ice age" 300 years ago, the notable feature was the lack of sunspots. Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.
Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.
Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that. I find it remarkable the Sun stays as consistent as it does.
Anyway, the Sun is a first order effect, and anything man-made is at best several orders beneath that. We have more to worry about if the Sun suddenly becomes unstable and goes nova than this so-called Global Warming.
I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.
Re:Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)
So I skipped the game I was heading to and spent the next hour helping a drunk concussed guy into an ambulance.
Why should I help him? What made him special? What makes it my responsibility? I was standing right frikkin' there watching, that's why.
The 'people' who 'lived off the land' for thousands of years? Mostly illiterate, innumerate, and died at ages 35-40. If they were lucky.
You don't own a computer just because you're hard-working and smart. It's because you're smart and hard-working and had the insane good luck to be born as one of the small fraction of the world's population who get a starting point good enough that that makes a difference.
I don't need to know you to know that; the fact that you can post here makes it a near-as-dammit certainty.
As you said, some people live in disaster zones or wars and genuinely need help. This 'some people' is not a few stragglers; it's tens of millions. Where the hell do you think that UN aid goes? Look it up sometime. And until you do, you've been too lazy to comment on the issue, so don't.
The ignorance in this post is depressing, even for /.
Re:Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as an African... You don't know what you are talking about. Most of the starvation is caused by dumb ass politicians. Zimbabwe on its own could probably feed most of Africa, unfortunately all the farms got stolen by Mugabe and "redistributed" which means given to the party faithful and families of politicians none of whom have a clue how to run a commercial farm.
All the rest of the starving countries have similar dumb political problems.
In central Africa the ground is so fertile you can literally toss an apple core on the ground and come back 3 weeks later to see an apple tree starting to grow.
Run properly Africa could probably feed most of the world.
Re:How long do we have, really? (Score:1, Interesting)
You're assuming of course that our civilisation will survive peak oil quite happily. For an example of a civilisation that over utilised finite natural resources read up on Easter Island.
With China and India increasing demand for oil, could we afford the price when the recession ends?
No...But on the other hand, I do not think the recession will end. Why would it? to end a recession, you need to have massive growth...When the recession is imho clearly related to us hitting the growth ceiling (population-wise, consumption-wise, oil(i.e. cheap-energy)-wise. Bare major technological break-through, where will the growth comes from? Nowhere, and there is not technological breakthrough in sight...
Re:OOOK (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a global warming denier
"Global warming denier"? Are people actually using that term?
If one disagrees with the dogma of the day, that makes one a "denier"? Sigh. Political correctness has gotten way out of hand.
Re:Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train.
Well, the train was already quite mature by then, and there were several elevated lines in New York. And of course the opening of the first NY subway line falls clearly out of that time range (1904).
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html [enviroliteracy.org]
It's not like horse manure was the only problem BTW: "In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses. Special trucks were devised to remove dead horses; since the average weight of dead horses was 1,300 pounds, one text on municipal refuse advised that "trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive lift."
The coming of the automobile dealt another large blow to the horse. Experimental motor cars had been around for a long time, but cities had always banned them. The crisis of the 1890s and early twentieth century, involving public health fears about pollution, traffic jams, and rising prices for both hay, oats, and urban land, made municipal governments and urban residents much more ready to switch to autos.
Re:Nothing New (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html [enviroliteracy.org]:
While the nineteenth century American city faced many forms of environmental pollution, none was as all encompassing as that produced by the horse. The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems. The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route or deposited in the stable. While cities made sporadic attempts to keep the streets clean, the manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.
Inventors and city officials devised improved methods of street cleaning and street sweeping became a major urban expense. Increasingly, however, it became obvious that the most effective way to eliminate the "typhoid fly" (so named by L.O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology of the Department of Agriculture and a leader in the campaign against flies), was to eliminate the horse.
As late as the 1890s, a Scientific American writer noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made conversation nearly impossible, while the author William Dean Howells complained that "the sharp clatter of the horses' iron shoes" on the pavement tormented his ear.
In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses.
Yeah, right, the "Horse made problems" were just made up by the liberals and it simply wasn't that bad.
Re:Nothing New (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, so human error will always happen, right? That's why newer plants fail safe. All western plants have containment domes, and newer plant types (such as pebble bed reactors or Generation III reactors like the AP1000 [wikipedia.org]) are passively safe, which means that even if all the coolant is removed, nothing happens. Also, most plants automatically scram (insert control rods to maximum positions) on error.
Now let's look at Three Mile Island. A problem in an unrelated system caused the primary feedwater pump to fail. The reactor automatically went to scram as designed (thus showing what I said in the last paragraph). However, a valve that would vent steam caused by heating the water by decay heat (since radioactive decay still happens even when no fission is going on), failed to close, and the monitoring systems did not show clearly enough that it was indeed open long after it should be.
The result was that the reactor in question (TMI-2) was severely damaged and some radioactive Krypton was released. What danger did this entail? To quote the Merck manual [merck.com], "the Three Mile Island accident did not result in major radiation exposure; in fact, anyone living within 1 mile of the plant received only about 0.08 mSv additional radiation". As a comparison, a chest x-ray is between 0.05 and 0.1 mSv [southernxray.com.au].
Solar might be more safe, but it also occupies a great deal of space and is much more expensive. Fossil fuel plants pollute and for coal in particular, there are mining accidents; since a given amount of coal provides much less energy than a given amount of uranium, a lot more has to be mined for the same amount of energy. Chernobyl was the Bhopal of nuclear power, but we don't stop making pesticides just because of Bhopal, and so we shouldn't stop nuclear power just because of Chernobyl either, but instead take the proper precautions and engineer the systems to be safe.
Re:And they were probably correct (Score:3, Interesting)
Temperatures haven't been going down by any significant amount. It was a cold winter in parts of the US and Europe, but 2008 was still in the top ten hottest years on record, 2007 in the top three.
Here's NASA's map of average global temperatures for 2008:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36699 [nasa.gov]
Doesn't look particularly good does it?
GCMs are not predictive of climate reality (Score:1, Interesting)
The parent to whom you replied may not know, but I do, as I've run the Global Climate Models in which you seem to place so much trust.
Unfortunately, your trust is misplaced. The best GCMs of the current crop are not able to simulate the Earth's processes well enough to yield predictions that correlate with the climate of our past, and therefore are worthless as predictors of future climate.
It's no surprise at all. After all, they don't model the oceanic processes that exchange CO2 at all well, they ignore oceanic biota and the recent devastation of oceanic diversity entirely, and they barely touch the most important warming control process of them all, which is cloud formation, because we do not understand it. As a result, the GCMs are interesting as tools that increase our powers of analysis, but they are worthless as part of the scientific method that puts theories to the test. They fail that test.
So don't be so fast at putting your trust in others, whether they be high priests of religion or of climatology. The science in this area is at an early stage of analysis, and climatological prediction is at a handwaving stage only. We currently deal with limited processes and do not yet have a predictive science.
Re:Positive feedback loops. (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure the better informed reader can add a few more of these positive feedback loops, but in my humble opinion, these are the stronger ones, and make the process of global warming unstoppable.
You're so right! We did it! Humanity has achieved what supervolcanoes with all their CO2-emissions failed to achieve - massive positive feedback loops! Unstoppable!
For 4.5 billion years, earth might have maintained its fragile balance between supercold and Venus' twin brother engulved in heat and acid rain. It's completely beyond me how that could have lastet so long - no, it must be our special state of being the first intelligent living things, the first walking non-animals (clearly an abomination that has to be punished by nature) which tipped the scales. Now we're heading the Venus-way.
Of course this is bullshit.
Earth is currently relatively cool. It used to be a lot warmer most of the time. Whatever we do, the best we can hope to achieve is to heat it up to relatively warm and to do so quickly enough to cause mass extincion of plants and animals, opening massive ecological niches for new species to conquer.
We're possibly endangering human civilization in the process with it being undescided if the species will survive this or not. But the odds are, that we're positioned pretty well. We can eat both plants and meat and we've proven to be formidabely adoptable to various climates. Anyhow, even a complete breakdown of civilization will be unlikely to push us further back than rural africa, native americans in the rainforests or natives to australia in the outback.
So no, we're not destroying the planet. That's something completely impossible for us and quite unimaginable even for the future (if you define earth as a roughly ball-shaped lump of mostly rock floating around the sun).
No, we're not destroying life on earth. Life has endured worse than us and most of the biomass of the planet is presumably living underground anyway (as in bacteria with very slow metabolism capable to "feed" on the energies released by natural radioactivity found in very deep deep mines in south-africa, to name just one example.)
No, we're propably not destroying humanity either. Would be quite hard to achieve, given how far spread it is and how well adjusted to how many climates. And how it was so before the modern age.
But yes, we might endanger gouvernments, civilization as we know it and so forth. And Venice, of course, unless the dutch take over Italy. But why would they?
Re:Nothing New (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it does.
Almost all of the major advances of civilization have been because of private individuals creatively solving a personal problem or looking to make a buck. The only thing Government can do is get in the way.
Personally, I see TFA as nothing more than CYA. The few scientists left publicly espousing the "anthropogenic global warming" myth are realizing that the scientific community of the world has moved on as the evidence against that theory has piled up. While governments and the media of the world are lagging behind by about 10 years, Science has found that AGW is BS, and that man simply cannot do anything to affect the global climate in any meaningful way. (Perhaps if we deliberately set out to destroy the environment, maybe. But certainly NOT by simply continuing to exist in the manner in which we are accustomed to.)
Thus, the few AGW supporting scientists left are trying to recover what scraps of scientific integrity they have (and to save their funding) by saying: Well, it's too late! You blew it up! You blew it all to Hell, you damn dirty Humans!
(With apologies to the late Charlton Heston)
Re:Nothing New (Score:3, Interesting)
The government does have legitimate roles. One of those roles is law enforcement. Here's a great example of a law that should be enforced (18 USC 1341):
If the government had thrown the criminals in jail instead of giving them bailouts then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Lying, cheating and stealing are crimes and should be punished appropriately. Then a free market can function.
Global cooling, now global warming... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:First post (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm so sick of this.
WE HAVE ICE CORE DATA. WE ARE NOT IN A COOLING PERIOD. We are nearing the peak of our warming period. Then for another 5K years it'll slowly decline, we hit an ice age, and slowly it works back up.
Ice core samples from all over the globe confirm this. Humans have practically NIL impact upon the cycle itself. One of my friends just did a trip to Antarctica for this very study.
Re:First post (Score:5, Interesting)
So, if I get you right, you say that you will not act or even stop trying to convince other people that everything is just fine until the poles are molten, the gulf stream redirected, the climate drastically changed and with it the world economy ruined, mass extinctions going on, the oxygen in the air becoming scarce etc.?
I mean, WTF?
I do notw know which scientist got the best model for the climate but here are some facts:
Source [un.org].
WTF?
I mean, does this not sound plausible? I mean, to me it seems to be highly likely that our process of changing the composition of our atmosphere by releasing gigatons of previously absorbed CO2 would yield some big disturbing change.
So, here you are, not wanting to "believe" this "myth". Okey, so what? What if it turns out to be a real myth? And what if it turns out not to be a myth?
By the time that you will find yourself convinced of this immanent threat to humanity, it will be to late. To late for you, your children, your grandchildren, humanity. As the article tells, in a way it is already to late. Which by no means should be read as: "It is to late to act.". No, like, if you are a smoker, you might already have done some irreversible damage to your body. Which does not mean there would be no purpose in giving up smoking, right?
And what the hell do you think is convenient about your lacy ignorant "I-am-such-a-great-doubter" attitude? You get to drive your SUV without a bad conscience while ruining the planet you have borrowed from your children with it. Oh, how inconvenient that is.
You know