Draft of IPCC 2013 Report Already Circulating 306
First time accepted submitter iggymanz writes "More precise modeling has changed some long term climate predictions: sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century, but past dire warnings of stronger storms or more frequent droughts won't pan out. Instead there will be less strong storms, but peak winds in the tropics might be slightly higher. Temperature rise of global average will be about 3 degree C total, including the 1 degree C rise over the 20th century. In places where precipitation is frequent, it will become even more frequent; in arid areas, the tendency will be to become even drier. Some new arid areas are expected to appear in the south of N. America, South Africa and Mediterranean countries. Overall, hardly a doomsday scenario."
Re:ENOUGH ALREADY !! CAN'T DO SHIT ABOUT IT ANYWAY (Score:4, Informative)
Just sit back and chill !! You can't do anything about it !! NO !! You CAN'T !!
Not as long as the disinformation campaign [wikipedia.org] is running in the USA, no.
Re:Pretty doomsday to me (Score:2, Informative)
You're glossing over the fact that that's a one meter rise in _mean_ sea level. Oscillating tides can change that to be +/- 5 meters in some places (e.g. Cook Inlet of Alaska, or the Bay of Fundy). Depending on the weather, storm surges can potentially have another additive affect. Most readers should be familiar with a normal distribution, where a subtle change in the mean can have a disproportionate affect on the extremes. So if you're expecting a one meter rise, to protect your coastal infrastructure from an extreme event such as a storm surge would generally require you to built levies well above that mean change.
Re:How surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually peak oil has happened. Why do you think you are paying $4 for gas, and we are drilling EVERYWHERE for the last dregs, not to mention trying to process tar sands. And why do you think economic growth worldwide sucks? Why do you think global oil production is in a downtrend?
1960's big freeze - I call bullshit. There was never a scientific consensus that this would happen.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm [skepticalscience.com]
1970's - Ozone layer was preserved because of a concerted global response to remove the cause of it's shrinkage. Duh.
1980's - Aids has killed 15 million people. Go talk to people living in countries where it is pandemic and then come back and tell me nothing has happened.
http://www.avert.org/aids-impact-africa.htm [avert.org]
2003 - SARS. Please cite a claim that it was going to wipe us all out.
2005 - Avian Flu - ditto
2012 - Oh BS.
Alarmist predictions are made alarmist by news reporters. The actual predictions have been pretty much accurate.
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-pair-global.html [phys.org]
Re:The political construct is unraveling (Score:5, Informative)
The very notion of a secret draft plays into peoples biases, it also depends on people's ignorance of basic facts. Some easily verifiable facts:
The IPCC conducts it's business in the open [www.ipcc.ch] and are more than happy to respond to a layman who spots a trivial typo in a draft (as I did circa 2001).
They're expecting ~100K review comments this time around.
The thousands of scientists and others involved do not get a dime from the IPCC, all work is donated (aside from 3-4 permanent office staff).
The IPCC's accounts can also be found via that link.
Their $5-6M annual budget comes from donations by the governments of over 100 countries of all political stripes. Somewhat ironically the bulk of it is spent on airline tickets..
The political construct is unraveling
The headline hit the nail on the head, but I'm pretty sure it's not the nail the GP was aiming at.
Re:The political construct is unraveling (Score:2, Informative)
I recall in the 1970's when we were all headed to the next ice age - the computer models all kept falling into something called "white earth" and never warmed up again.
An article in Newsweek written by a scientifically-illiterate journalist is not the same as a peer-reviewed article written by an actual scientist working in the field. As to the rest of your nonsense, you do realize that science works by "changing the story" all the time? I guess by your "reasoning" gravity doesn't exist either since we have more refined models than Newtonian gravitational theory.
Re:The political construct is unraveling (Score:5, Informative)
Climate skeptics have played the media and the general populace like a fiddle. They point to the relatively small number of scientists who speculated on global cooling, and then say, "they can't make up their minds". They pick the
No ice age [Re:The political construct...] (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. The political angle has been apparent for quite some time - I figured it was an attempt to stop the developing world from advancing. Say to prevent China and India from becoming the dominant players on the world stage.
So, to be clear: you believe that Manabe and Wetherald's landmark 1967 paper (which built on Manabe and Strickler 1964) that calculated the amount of warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, was work that was actually done "to prevent China and India from becoming the dominant players on the world stage"? Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever? Can you find some 1964 references saying that politicians were seriously worried about "China and India becoming the dominant players on the world stage," much less were instructing scientists to make up data to prevent it?
... I recall in the 1970's when we were all headed to the next ice age - the computer models all kept falling into something called "white earth" and never warmed up again.
That's been debunked ages ago. The "next ice age" played well in the media-- it made Time and Newsweek--but it was never a scientific consensus. Check out "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus" in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 [ametsoc.org] , or the discussion and links here: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/18/now-out-in-bams-the-myth-of-th/ [scienceblogs.com]
...One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
Sorry, but this is the way science happens: the overall physics is understood, and then the details are slowly filled and the error bars are refined and the calculations get better.
Let me remind you that the overall physics of the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been remarkably constant. Today's best estimate of the warming effect is still within the error bars of Manabe and Wetherald's original 1967 calculation, and if you plot their predictions against the actual measured temperatures, using the measured values of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the data fits perfectly.
We have pretty good confidence that we know the physics of the greenhouse effect. Scientists has not been "keeping changing your story"-- it's been physics that's been well understood for over a hundred years, and the same overall calculation with the same net result, to within the error bars, for close to fifty years.
Re:No ice age [Re:The political construct...] (Score:5, Informative)
...One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
Sorry, but this is the way science happens: the overall physics is understood, and then the details are slowly filled and the error bars are refined and the calculations get better.
It's a terrible, terrible thing when scientists try to improve their predictions. They should just make something up and stick to it in the face of all countering evidence, like cranks do.
I'm sure the GP poster will be reassured to learn that creationists also recognize the validity of this argument. Great minds think alike, and all that.
We have pretty good confidence that we know the physics of the greenhouse effect.
We can even measure the earth's reduced thermal radiation at the frequencies absorbed by greenhouse gasses, compared to when measurements were first made around 1970. See this article [skepticalscience.com], second plot from the top.