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."
Alien Civilizations (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out .. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else: they either boil, starve, or poison themselves.
If this projection is correct, and the effect grows at an exponential rate, it will be 1 degree for the last century, (order of) 3 for the next, 9 for the one after that, and then it is either super-tech or extinction.
Careful now, humans.
On the whole (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather have more accurate models than more precise models.
Bad models don't get any better by adding decimal places.
I expect that accurate modelling of something as complex as climate is really, really hard.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How do you model such a complicated system? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because YOU are ignorant of the methods and the available accuracy doesn't mean everyone is.
What's your preference, ignore the possibility that we could be destroying our world because predicting the future is difficult?
Yeah, good plan.
Re:I still don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking of stupid, anybody who takes this IPCC "draft" trolling seriously are being duped. The IPCC are climate change deniers [blogspot.com.es], hiding behind a thin veil that can hardly be called "science" [blogspot.com.es]
The end game of the massive well funded disinformation campaign [wikipedia.org] being to influence as many people as possible into taking strong climate change denial opinion [slashdot.org]. The problem is, the likes of Fox news and troll news like this one are succeeding very well in this aim, http://environment.yale.edu/climate/the-climate-note/ [slashdot.org]>as this graph shows. Science and evidence be damned.
IPCC Disinformation campaign:
The slide above comes from the presentation of Hans von Storch to the InterAcademy Review of the IPCC [interacademycouncil.net], presented earlier this week in Montreal. The slide references the misrepresentation of the issue of disasters and climate change [blogspot.com] by the IPCC. von Storch is very clear in his views:
Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release [blogspot.com] to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible [blogspot.com]. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.
A former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, says the following in the context of the 2035 glacier issue [nature.com], but could be equally applied to the disaster issue:
The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.
Re:How surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)
They build ever more accurate models, and test them for their ability to make predictions.
There are now dozens of supercomputers that have been built for the purpose of climate modeling, and on those, hundreds of different climate models have been run.
Now please tell us which one of those hundreds of models shows the best skill at prediction.
Surely we know which model that is.. and surely we know which supercomputers were involved in the simulations.. and surely future funding for bigger and better supercomputers is going towards the refinement of only the best models..
A citation indicating which model shows the best skill at prediction should be pretty easy given these facts. You don't have one because their prediction skill isnt what is being tested.. its their fitting skill that is tested as a proxy for prediction. They dont wait to see which models show skill at prediction.. they put in for new funding for larger supercomputers immediately after they can show that they can fit the data.
Re:I still don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that whether or not AGW is true the response should be the same. More nuclear and natural gas. Less ethanol and foreign sourced oil. Drop the stupid subsidies on windmills, solar panels, and electric cars.
Electric cars are now a mature technology. We no longer need to subsidize them since people are buying top dollar electric cars anyway. Electric car subsidies are just the wealthy legislating more more to the wealthy so they can by their status symbols. Also, until we replace coal power with nuclear these cars produce more carbon than a gasoline, diesel, or especially natural gas counterpart.
Windmills rarely produce a net carbon savings because they are still backed up by inefficient natural gas turbines or, the largest culprit of carbon output, coal.
End this insanity with CFL bulbs. I don't like the idea of having fragile, mercury filled, glass tubes hanging over where I eat and sleep. If we had nuclear instead of coal it would not matter what kind of lighting I chose when it comes to carbon output.
If we cannot figure out whether or not ethanol actually saves on carbon or not then perhaps we should not be dumping so much money into it. If people want ethanol then let them have it, just don't make me buy it so you can feel better about yourself. Like the CFL bulb example above this would all be moot if we could get some natural gas and electric (from nuclear) vehicles on the road.
The nice thing about all of this is that it involves reducing government influence on our lives, increases the choices of the consumer, lower taxes, greater wealth for all, and no painful transitions in infrastructure. This is also precisely why it will not happen. AGW is about bigger government, not saving the world.
Re:Pretty doomsday to me (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that's a LONG time, consider that mankind was traversing oceans 500 years ago.
1903 we first took flight.
1942 we flew the first operational jet fighter.
1961 we put the first man in space.
1969 we put the first man on the moon.
1971 we put the first space station in orbit.
1980 we put the first re-usable vehicle into space.
Today there are over a dozen private companies with space flight capability.
500 years from now? You can't even begin to imagine what technology will be available. The only thing that you can be sure of is that it will look like magic.
Re:The political construct is unraveling (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a good and insighful read of the author of the study that became media's "next ice age" in the 1970s has to say about it: http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_7.html#schneider [edge.org]
He ends with:
Re:I'm detecting a trend... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, all you highly intelligent motivated reasoning alarmists out there, the biggest damage that was ever done to your position was the wild exaggeration and apocalyptic doom mongering. Yes, it has been fairly pointed out that there is a contingent of skeptics who scare monger about the "New World Order", and the UN controlling everyone, but that trope hasn't benefitted the CAGW crowd nearly as much as they've been harmed by their own end of the world rhetoric.
Funny, I hear a lot less end-of-the-world rhetoric than I hear accusations of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Also, the biggest damage to widespread knowledge of the truth wasn't done by alarmism, but by shills for Big Oil writing opinion pieces in influential newspapers and magazines.
Re:I still don't get it... (Score:4, Interesting)
My so called "pissing on others' yards" is the fault of the government. They are the ones not letting people build more nuclear power plants. If we replace all these coal plants with nuclear ones we would put a very significant dent in the carbon output we produce.
CFL bulbs are a band-aid on a gun shot wound. Electricity is used for many things other than lighting. If we put our efforts in building nuclear power plants then ALL electricity use gains. Electric cars are one example. Getting an electric car does not "save the planet" if we're burning coal to charge them up. Electric cars only make sense if the electricity comes from an energy source that has less carbon output than an equivalent gasoline or diesel car would.
For the record, I am for heavily taxing incandescent bulbs rather than banning them.
That's a distinction without a difference. The government would still be doing nothing about the real problem, carbon output from coal fired electric power plants. Replace those coal plants with nuclear and the light bulbs I buy should not matter to anyone.