Climate Change To Drive Weather Disasters, Say UN Experts 572
mdsolar writes "Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday. In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather. And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said."
It's more than just global warming gas (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's more than just global warming gas (Score:5, Insightful)
There is 7 BILLION people on this planet, and nearly 1/3 of the forest has been cut down in the last century. With all the polution humans cause, and millions roads that we built, how can anyone dispute our involvement in climate change?
The same way a certain kind of person disputes any other fact that has implications they don't like.
Or that their leaders don't like, and tell them that they shouldn't like either.
More, less, anything is caused by AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am socially and fiscally conservative. I believe in states' rights. The data about what exactly is happening to our climate is muddy. The outcomes are unknown. There is a lot of politics behind it.
But what we are doing to the environment cannot be good. We need to do something about it. Add a $5/gal tax to gasoline and use the money to develop public transporation and bicycling infrastructure. Bar new fossil fuel plants. Build offshore wind farms, the Kennedys be damed. Add tarrifs to good from countries that are not cutting emissions. Invest in next-generation nuclear reactor development. Ban cars from city centers. Stop giving tax rebates to people buying hybrids - give tax rebates to people buying bicycles, train tickets, and bus tickets. Stop building cities around cars.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More, less, anything is caused by AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's more than just global warming gas (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, but to play devil's advocate i would reply:
in pretty much the same way people can actually defend creationism vs evolution. in spite of all the scientifical artifacts, findings and proofs pointing toward one direction.
men will find deeply defend what they think must be true, despite all evidences.
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like an obese person who eats junk food all day, and says his diabetes has nothing to do with his diet!
But you can't prove that it's the diet that is causing the diabetes. Might as well be lack of excercise, or too much wanking, or whatever. Correlation != causation and so on.
That said, if I was fat and started to develop a type 2 diabetes, I would fix my diet, just in case.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure no one thinks the idea of pumping shit-tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a GOOD thing. It's not a question of whether we should do something about this, it's a question of how to most rationally balance our economic interests and our long-term environmental interests. The problem is that reason has become a scarce commodity in both sides of the debate at this point. The increasingly shrill alarmism of the left and the head-in-the-sand denialism of the right are making for the kind of emotionally-charged debate that's making it damn near impossible to chart a clear path that's going to keep the planet from warming too much while also not creating an economic disaster worse than the environmental one.
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't waste any effort having a conversation with AC and his/her ilk. They won't believe anything that is in conflict with their world view. Their motto must be ignorance is bliss!
I'm having trouble telling you two apart.
~Loyal
Re:It's more than just global warming gas (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying "both sides do it" is the mark of someone who is not thinking critically. One side has peer reviewed research and a strong consensus while the other has manipulation through the media by people who are not bound by the same standards. This creates a distortion that is inevitably repeated by people like Anon-Admin who think in a few short sentences they can dispute decades of research.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I am a libertarian.
Global warming has been studied so carefully, scientifically and so thoroughly by so many, that I don't think that it can be denied. At least in the geological short term. The amount and speed of warming can still be debated.
However, the response to this warming insight seems to be based entirely on emotional, non-scientific and non-economic grounds. The "cure" seems to be mostly based on reversing greenhouse gas emissions, whereas alternatives or simply adapting to changed conditions are dismissed.
The King Canute's should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. Let's see the same intellectual engagement in the response to global warming as there has been to climate change itself.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I listen to it, for the sole reason that I do not have an exit plan for when this planet becomes uninhabitable. I cannot shrug, say "oh well, looks like it failed" and head over for my other Earth and start over there.
In risk management, we'd handle it as a high risk, regardless of the probability. The impact is devastating, the probability nonzero, resulting in a risk you have to take serious and handle.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one respectable is saying climate change will ruin the earth, or even wipe out humanity... Please stop with this falsehood. When you set cost to EXTREME MAXIMUM it makes cost-benefit analysis impossible for you to perform.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you willing to tell all of the people below the poverty line that they can no longer afford to drive to work, pay for the food and afford to heat their house?
And bicycles? trains? That might be fine for whatever city you're living in, but there are many places in this country where such means of transportation are absolutely not available. Think seriously about the economic consequences of what you're proposing. Wind is not a viable alternative energy source yet, and won't be for some time, if ever.
You Don't Know What You're Talking About (Score:4, Insightful)
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
It's a 594 page report with 220 authors from 62 nations leaving 18,611 review comments published by the United Nations. And that's what your professional assessment of this effort? Great press? Extortion?
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before.
So I have two things here, I have a six hundred page report with many many many citations from peer reviewed journals. And I have your two or three sentences of cheap rhetoric -- you don't live on the coasts so you say "depends on where you are and what change you experience." And we should just all turtle inwards and say "fuck commerce and 90% of the world population"? You say that we know it's been hotter than before yet you don't explain how the temperature slowly got to that point, slower than a hundred years, slow enough for it not to totally destroy a key link in the food chain. Nobody's depending on polar bears, but what happens when the fisheries in the ocean start coming up drastically short or we get another dust bowl? This report, it's not worried about Earth, animals, plants, etc. It's worried about humans. We depend on those other things but the reason to worry is not FUD and your idiotic assertions aren't doing anything to calm anybody. So please shut the hell up until you have something meaningful to contribute.
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable
It occurs that weather patterns on earth have not been that predictable, ever.... prediction of weather is inherently hard. Scientists have done a good job explaining away weather phenomena in the past, such as ice ages. But the state of the art has never been any good at predicting changes in weather patterns like that.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of this from a risk management position.
The naysayers basically seem to be stating that the science must be absolutely ironclad before we settle on any course of action, other than what we're doing today.
If they're wrong, and if climate change is real, then we're all in a whole big pile of hurt. I won't say that the Earth will become uninhabitable, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that the Earth won't sustain the current population or society. It'll be more than bad enough.
If they're right, and climage change isn't happening, then they're out some profitability.
The question is how much remediation we do, how much we cut back, how much we push conservation, and how much we push alternative energy. For the first measure, to fail to push conservation in many forms is absolutely criminal, because it's good, no matter what. Better-insulated houses are just plain better, and will require less fuel, of whatever form. Same thing for higher-mileage cars, obviously balancing for safety. Sometimes I think in America the use of fossil fuel is considered a right, almost a duty - when if it were more properly considered an expense we'd be taking different actions.
Re:It's more than just global warming gas (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your idea sounds good. Any ideas on what you're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from your changes?
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's true, there needs to be more competition in the insurance industry. What is stopping them from raising premiums for any reason whatsoever?
I knew that the denial crowd would leap for this. Everything has to be interpreted as a conspiracy, or people lying, or being dishonest, or evil, or stupid. Anything but accept that intelligent people are trying to tell you something.
/counter-evidence/, like a good skeptic actually would.
Well, the actuaries in the insurance industry have done the math, and worked out that they need to raise premiums to deal with the already measurable risk. You can dismiss this out of hand if you like, but you'll still have to pay. Instead, you could, of course, extend yourself by learning something about he issue. And that means you should stop reading partisan blogs, and find
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, no. We'd immediately implement an exemption for people making less than 800% of the poverty level and pass an income tax credit for almost all of the rest. Thankfully the tax prep industry is tightly coupled with Washington, so you know the next version of TaxCut or TurboTax will take this into consideration.
We'll need to implement a National ID you will be required to present at the gas station so it can link to a central database to approve each purchase. We'll contract that out to private industry who will, of course, need to take just a small percentage of the transaction to cover their expenses. No point in having state issued ID's anymore so we'll just ban them.
Naturally we'll need a lot of new laws and regulations to implement this new tax. Because $5/gal tax is going to inspire a bunch of black market activity we'll have to establish a new Department of Energy Security (DES) . The DES will have to have extreme police powers to conduct their newly established war on un-taxed gas smugglers which will include para-military forces making no-knock raids on private residences. For the children; y'know.
In the end, we'll have a massive new Federal bureaucracy with a well established constituency of special interests. They'll, of course, be hiring a lot of lobbyists and every time the budget comes up for renewal we'll have a parade of our 'elected' officials telling us we can't possibly cut funding (read: give smaller increases) to the new bureaucracy or some unspecified "THEY" will win.
Since we're excluding almost everyone from the tax and we've got a new bureaucracy to pay for, it turns out we're not getting quite as much revenue as we'd like and the only option at that point will be to nationalize the entire petrochemical industry. Don't worry though, we'll pay for it all by raising the gas tax and cutting waste and fraud.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Resource availability changes. Lifestyles have to adjust.
Looking around my city, it would hurt the upper middle class the most. The poor live in small houses or apartments in the city. They can already get to work by bus, and many of them do. Traffic is slow (30mph limits) and bicycling is easy. They can walk to a grocery store or two in under twenty minutes. They will have to buy more sweaters and keep the heat down in the winter; some of the fuel tax could go towards expanding programs like HEAP (Home Energy Assistance Program).
The upper middle class live in large houses in sprawling suburbs. Their heating bills will be astronomical. Buses do not run out there. Roads in the developments meander to nowhere useful and then dump out onto busy highways where walking and cycling is frightening. They have to travel 5+ miles to get to anything other than houses. And they're already underwater with their mortgages. When the housing prices in more efficient areas go up and theirs plumet, they will be bankrupt.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you live in the US, you are already benefiting from redistribution of wealth toward drivers. Current gas taxes do not come anywhere close to covering road costs. You are being subsidized by people like me who pay income and property taxes to support the roads but then bike to work. I am proposing letting you pay out of your own wages.
Re:Conservative meltdown in 5..4..3..2..1.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to be against my idea. Any ideas on what we're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from not making changes?
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:1, Insightful)
if people understood the difference then maybe it'll be more acceptable. The deniers ALWAYS misinterpret this either deliberately or through lack of comprehension
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I don't know about suppressed. As far as I know, the evidence for lamarckian inheritance wasn't strong enough for most researchers to accept it without a plausible mechanism. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:It's more than just global warming gas (Score:4, Insightful)
men will find deeply defend what they think must be true, despite all evidences.
Upton Sinclair put it in a rather elegant manner:
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on not understanding it.
It has become fairly clear from the evidence that the climate change is being strongly pushed by human economic (industrial and agricultural) activity. A small population of people have a strong financial interest in continuing the current practices. We have lots of history saying that in such situations, the people profiting from an activity will prevent change until the disaster actually occurs. Then they'll take their riches and move on, leaving the disaster for the rest of the population to deal with.
Something that has been missed in most of the "discussions": The fact that human activity is forcing these changes means that humans now have the ability with our technology to control our climate, at least on a coarse world-wide level. We have the technical ability to shove the climate in whatever direction we prefer. But we aren't doing this. We're still leaving our major institutions in the hands of people who are personally profiting from the current climate pushing. Whatever direction this might be is less important than the fact that continuing is leading to problems that we are now capable of preventing. We just need the social and political will to do so.
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
Just look as the Vostock ice core data. "Stable climate" is nonsense historcially - whether simply changes over time. Humanity gained technology during a 10000 year anomoly where whether patterns were somewhat stable, but that's otherwise unseen in the past million or so years. We should expect climate change; it's normal. We're in an ice age, and either we'll return to normal glaciation quite soon (in geological terms) wth most of europe, Russia, and Canada wiped off the map, or by some quite unlikely coincidence we happen to be around for the transition between an ice age and a warm Earth (which happenes every few hundred million years).
A warm Earth, BTW, supports far more land (and likely sea) life than the current ice age, as most of the warming happens at the poles. And if humanity with all our technology can't survive a few storms, we don't deserve to.