Dialing Back the Alarm On Climate Change 490
An anonymous reader writes "A leaked copy of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made the rounds and the good news is that the predicted temperature rise expected as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than predicted in 2007. From the article: 'Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet. Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.'"
OK, I'll Start (Score:1, Insightful)
The Computer Models were "a bit off" then ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
(Sound of pooch being screwed.) This is how real science works, particularly with highly complex issues like the earth's climate. We learn new things as we go along, and when new knowledge means we need to adjust our undestanding, that's what is done. The next update by the IPCC (if it gets funded, that is) may well show that what we learn in the interim indicates that the current estimates of climate change were too small. Unfortunately, the polarization of politics will take this latest IPCC report (if it indeed says what the article states) as an indication that these science types have been lying to us all along and they should now be ignored and driven from the temple. Efforts to deal with the effects of the upcoming changes will be killed off and nothing will be done until it's too late to do much of anything other than hope to cope.
No change in number, just different wording (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm finding it hard to see what the change is here.
The old number was that the doubling sensitivity was most likely to be in the range 2 C-to-4.5 C. Specifically:
"we conclude that the global mean equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2C to 4.5C, with a most likely value of about 3C."
(reference: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5.html#box-10-2 [www.ipcc.ch] )
This report-- if the leaked version is accurate-- is that it's "'likely' to be above 1.5 degrees C, 'very likely' to be below 6 degrees C".
That's not a "reduction" or a "retreat"-- it is, at best, a slightly higher range. But since, as the summary says, "Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.," I don't see that there's any clear change at all-- just different wording.
This is spin-- there isn't be anything new here.
Re:Cheers to my old teacher (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know why people keep bringing this up as if it somehow negates global warming.
1) We *are* slowly heading into an ice age (read up on Milankovitch cycles), but it is not due for tens of thousands of years, so it's kind of irrelevant on century scale;
2) On a shorter time scale (the next century or two), we're expecting the Earth to warm up due to higher CO2 concentrations, and that is a concern.
There is nothing inconsistent about these two statements because they are at different timescales. Your logic is like saying you don't have to worry about the ski jump you're about to run into because over the long term the mountain slopes down. No, you should probably pay attention to what's in front of you and worry less about the long-term until the short-term is sorted out.
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
Like a tin-teardrop!
My dear God in heaven! We can even predict Brownian motion and particle distribution in 20 cubic meters, with percentages and concentrations involved with this "modeling".
Yet, with the introduction of additional variables, let us say n variables, which include surface interaction with seas, the presence of ice-sheets and glaciers, solar activity, volcanism, etcetera, ad infinitum... Somehow, a reliable and predictable model of planetary atmospheric climate - without prejudice or bias - is expected to be produced within the statistical expectations required to make policy decisions?
I hate Koch Brother-sponsored "make me obscenely richer" propaganda, much as the next free-thinker does. But there is also a giant, Billionaire-fueled machine at setting the agenda for individual and collective behavior, based on making dramatic assertions about "Global Climate". If you don't believe it?
Well, then Albert Gore has a bridge to sell you, and you've already made the first couple of payments - at the low, introductory "teaser" rate.
This whole business is a war between old-school resource robber-barons, and new-global capital, which looks to establish cooperation on permanent rentier concessions. Both spend tens-of-millions shaping perception (insert standard Edward Bernays reference [prmuseum.com]), in the form of "research science", think tanks and public policy forums. None of these players are charities...
Re:No change in number, just different wording (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, exactly this. This report doesn't lead to any conclusion that we should "dial back the alarm" as the news title suggests. The approval of this submission by slashdot editors shows either bias towards climate change denial, or just a desire for more linkbait, button-pushing articles. Perhaps both.
Re:What's with all the Global Warming stuff here? (Score:4, Insightful)
The ice story was particularly idiotic. The ice cover of 2012 was at an extreme low; this years it's pretty much spot on the (downward) trend line, which happens to lie 60% above the 2012 record. Drawing any long-term conclusion from that difference is like saying there will be no winter this year, because it was warmer today than yesterday.
Peter Hadfield summarised it [youtube.com] quite nicely in a video.
Living in the biosphere. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish that both "sides" in the climate change "debate" could put away the hyperbole and come to grips with the fact that we need to live in some way approaching equilibrium with the various processes happening here on planet Earth. That's not just about co2 production. Even though there is unquestionably consensus among climate scientists that the rising co2 level IS significant, there are *many* other factors at play. It won't matter if we get the co2 situation under control, but still have high-levels of fresh water pollution and half-dead oceans.
We need to pollute less, period.
We need to dramatically increase our total energy efficiency, which can largely be achieved by picking the "low-hanging fruit" of building insulation, indoor daytime lighting and industrial energy usage. All three of these can be addressed (easily!) with incentives like rebates and tax credits -- granted that takes political will, which seems in short supply, but it's all there already, just waiting to happen: just (gradually) shift the subsidies currently granted to fossil fuel companies over to businesses and homeowners that are willing to make investments in long-term energy efficiency and savings, it just makes sense: since energy saving == money saving.
The reality is that our total energy usage is increasing, so the more we stretch it, the more comfortable humanity can be in the long term. We need to be building as many solar, wind, wave, thermal gradient and salinity gradient systems as we can, all the while earnestly studying the effects and operation of these systems, and discovering our mistakes and correcting them as we go. We need better fission reactor designs: meaning serious R&D and testing. We need better (and more!) energy storage systems. And probably most importantly we need to come up with new ideas for generating and storing energy. Life is not static, we can't just say "hey, this is good enough" -- we have to make it better! Life forms don't stop evolving just because they find a successful niche. They keep going, because there's always more pressure around the corner. As humans, we've insulated ourselves from a lot of pressures, but that's really an illusion, since all we can ever really do is make buffers. Everything remains interconnected and interdependent.
As Bunker Roy [ted.com] says: Decentralize, demystify! People should know that they CAN provide for themselves, but they have to understand how it all works.
We are squandering our resources: geological, biological, financial and (most importantly) human. We need to refine our entire way of doing things.
The oil and coal WILL run out someday. It might be 100 years or 1000 -- but we need to be thinking truly long term here. It would be nice to still have plenty of oil and coal left for other stuff when we finally stop having to burn it for fuel just to keep the lights on. It's amazingly useful, and we have a finite supply.
The oceans (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
QOTD on Slashfooter, at time you responded:
"You can fool all the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough."
-- Joseph E. Levine
So you declare the film, and Gore's powerpoint, "largely accurate" through the single citation of single "Expert Witness" - Dr Philip Stott - in a court case?
Stott gave evidence, for the distribution of a film, in which he appears.
"The producers would like to assure you the public, that no actual research funding was hurt in the making of this film."
In "Inconvenient Truth" Gore told lies - provably false - about "hockeysticks" and polar bears. Manipulation. The only "six metre rise" factually indicated, was the level of bullshit - and the rise of my gorge, at such. Oh. And Kilimanjaro isn't thawing. Lake Chad is safe. Katrina was a disaster made by hubris and broken infrastructure - not human impact to a weather event.
Who funded the effort? Who was going to underwrite the proposed 50,000 copies distributed to schools? Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama? ;-)
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)
He's saying it isn't front page news every week. He's implying that if a Republican was in the White House, the media would be preaching global warming at every turn, just like they used to.
How we used to view all of this in the Olden Days (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead let's examine the issue in the terms that we used back in the 1970's:
1) Burning stuff releases pollutants.
2) Putting less pollutants into the air, water, and ground is a good thing.
Re:Right wing not to be trusted on IPCC leaks (Score:1, Insightful)
What kind of person points out failed predictions?
Perhaps you are not asking yourself the right question.
The oft stated prediction from the industry funded denialist machinery that the temperature wouldn't rise has been proven, demonstrably and unequivocally, false.
The follow on prediction from the industry funded denialist machinery that the temperature rise, though unusual, was cyclical and due to something natural, e.g. increased solar output has been proven, demonstrably and unequivocally, false.
So the question you should be asking yourself is, what kind of person continuously believes a body of work and people whose only achievement so far is being consistently wrong?
Re:What's with all the Global Warming stuff here? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's stupid trying to use outliers as evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate are guilty of this. The average trend is what everyone should be looking at. The same goes for pretty much everything. e.g. People get their panties in a bunch about plane crashes or nuclear reactor accidents, when statistically they are the safest forms of transportation and power generation respectively. People are convinced schools are becoming more dangerous because of recent mass shootings on the news, when in fact they're the safest they've ever been in spite of those shooting incidents. We give up our rights and freedoms because of a single hugely successful terrorist attack, when once you remove that single incident you're statistically more likely (in the U.S.) to be killed by lightning than a terrorist attack. All these incidents are outliers and they should be assumed to be non-representative of the long-term average.
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to know who to blame, blame the groups that try to use climate science to push their pet agendas like vegetarianism, socialism, organic, or whatever "new age" philosophies they think are mankinds next answer when they have almost nothing to do with the issue at hand.
(By the way I'm not speaking about whether vegetarianism or socialism or good or bad, just that they don't belong in this discussion and only serve to complicate things.)
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
"If it's human, it's biased."
There is "human error" - type bias, and then there is deliberate bias.
"Citation?"
The whole damned site.
Re:The Computer Models were "a bit off" then ? (Score:2, Insightful)
True. Instead, if all those resources and brains had been directed towards that actually mattered, we might have cures for HIV and cancer, landed humans on Mars, and achieved artificial intelligence. That's in addition to the fact that we might have a rapidly growing economy and more developing nations might be out of poverty.
Dealing with non-existent environmental threats is similar to fighting wars: it wastes resources and lives, and keeps humanity from making progress.
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
Real science also means that people don't run out and incur trillions of dollars in costs and expenses based on scientific speculation and papers that are barely a few years old and based on a couple of computer models with thousands of tunable parameters.
"These science types" have been lying to us, not about their discoveries, but about the confidence we should have in those discoveries, and for that they should be "ignored and driven from the temple".
Rational policy based on scientific results should be based on scientific results that have stood the test of time and numerous independent replications, and even then it is prudent to have doubts.
Re:NASA Climate Change Data (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's compare.
The CO2 graph (direct measurement) is clearly climbing at a never-before-seen rate.
Okay, graphs don't climb. That nitpick aside, it's clear that what is never before seen is the rate. The rate at which a quantity Q climbs is its derivative dQ/dt.
CO2 levels 18 times as high as they are today. ... we are currently at one of the low points for CO2 levels in Earths history.
Here, you're talking about the quantity Q and not its rate of increase dQ/dt.
It may surprise you to learn that a quantity and its derivative are totally different things, and that one can be very low while the other is very high.
This is actually a good tangent, though, because it's a frequent mistake. Graphs of temperature and CO2 over very long periods of time are often dominated by sharp transitions. This causes people to say that the current situation is not unprecedented because there were very sharp transitions in the past! The problem is that if you pick an appropriate time scale, all transitions look sharp. The reader is mentally comparing two graphs (CO2 or temperature today, of the course of a few hundred years, with ages ago, over the course of thousands). Quantification is absolutely necessary. Very roughly, the rate of CO2 and temperature increase today is at least an order of magnitude higher than the "natural" transitions of the past that we have (indirectly) measured. So yes, unprecedented.
Re:In before (Score:5, Insightful)
Imply all the sinister things you want about Gore. He's in it for the money? Sure. He's a hypocrite? Okay! He's lying? Hey, he's a politician and his lips are moving. He's just doing it for a carbon credit scheme? I believe it totally. In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and say that Al Gore is literally the devil. Everything bad you could say about him, I accept as truth.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way... why the fuck haven't we started doing anything serious about climate change when pretty much everyone agrees it's real?
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
Climate change has been occurring since the Earth, ejected as a lump of molten iron form the heart of the Sun, settled into orbit and began slowly cooling...
You want to stop hypothesized, anthropogenic contribution? Downsize the US navy to coastal defense. You will remove enough human-released C02 from being projected into the atmosphere, to prevent imposing tax-based austerities on the captive population. This will also block the creation of a speculative secondary derivative market for carbon credits - which is the real motivator behind this farce. Getting more of your limited financial resource into the pockets of the - already - super-rich.
Re:In before (Score:3, Insightful)
When they can't attack the science they attack the Mann (or Gore or Phil Jones, etc.).
Re: In before (Score:5, Insightful)
So what? You can be consistently wrong your entire life. It's meaningless.
Very funny. Did William Connoley edit that page? I doubt Mann's hockey stick will feature in the new IPCC report at all. Here's what Keith Briffa had to say about Mann's methods (from "climategate" emails):
Poorly "temperature representative"? Oh dear!
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In before (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop right there. Climate Change is always happening and always has. It's a straw man argument to suggest anyone thinks anything differently, or that any of these studies should come to any other conclusion. There aren't thousands of data sources and thousands of studies showing man's emissions of CO2 are responsible for that change. There's a hypothesis, baked into models, which seems to be largely inaccurate if you compare the output of those models to actual reality.
That fact that there are billions of dollars in grants to be had from gullible tax payers to institutions and NGOs researching this coming "catastrophe" should make you pause for thought if nothing else does. Why would the IPCC conclude it wasn't a catastrophe, if by doing so their very existence could be called into question? They don't want their gravy train to stop.
omfg (Score:4, Insightful)
Science updates its data, i.e. total non-story, it's like writing the sky is still blue and there are clouds moving - omg, moving! across it.
But of course, most people are really, really conservative at heart. Not in the political sense, necessarily. As a species, we hate change. Things that naturally change unsettle us. That's why for 99% of human history, things simply were. Fixed and eternal. You know, gods and their laws. Morality. Even today, just the idea that morals and ethics is something that changes and evolves is revolting. That fucking underage kids was perfectly fine in some ancient societies is not a topic for a polite dinner conversation, and the first instinct I bet almost everyone who just read that had was something along the lines of "what was wrong with them?".
And that is why you can make a headline out of the fact that something that everyone with three grams of working brain matter knows and expects to continuously be updated has, in fact, been updated.
Some days, I wonder how our species managed to survive at all. omfg, I think I just realized that everything else on this stupid planet must be even worse.
Re:Excellent! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Simply false" ? Only to the left wing AGW proponents driving their SUVs and flying around every week in their private jets, while living in the huge mansions, buying carbon offsets from a company they own.
Oh, and here: http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/09/01/antarctic-ice-sheet-growing-study-mass-gains-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-exceed-losses/ [climatedepot.com]