Upper Limit On Emissions Likely To Be Exceeded Within Decades 324
An anonymous reader writes "A panel of expert climate scientists appointed by the United Nations has come to a consensus on an upper limit for greenhouse gases. The panel says we will blow past this limit in just a few decades if emissions continue at their current pace. 'To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.' You can read a summary of the report's findings online (PDF). It says plainly, 'It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming (PDF) since the mid-20th century.'"
Re:Um what TF? (Score:5, Informative)
The rate of natural sequestration is so slow that for the purposes of planning within the next century, we can use a fixed amount. Technically you're correct but natural sequestration is hardly fast enough to be relevant to our civilization.
I Thought It Was Clear (Score:4, Informative)
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.
Re:Um what TF? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:1 unit carbon burned = ? units co2? (Score:3, Informative)
The formula tells you.
CO2 = 1 atom of carbon, two atoms of oxygen.
Carbon has atomic mass 12 (well, most of it). Oxygen has atomic mass 16.
If you burn 12 tonnes of carbon you'll take 32 tonnes of oxygen and produce 44 tonnes of CO2.
Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, for the last time, you can't cite the crazy street hobo as a legitimate source.
Depending on which data set you use and which source, the US comes in around 12 per capita for carbon emissions. What's more, is that it has slowly decreased over the past 20+ years whereas many other companies have exploded upwards in the same time frame. Now, most of those countries with higher per capita emissions are much smaller countries than the US and we're still near or at the top of total emissions, but that doesn't change your crazy street hobo wrongness about per capita.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita [wikipedia.org]
Re:High Certainty. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:High Certainty. (Score:2, Informative)
Funny. The IPCC puts its certainty at 95%, which is somewhat confusing as it's unable to show any accounting for that figure.
It gets worse. The discrepancy between models and actual reality continues to grow [climateaudit.org]. Surely this makes the science more uncertain, not less. Yet somehow the IPCC find themselves increasingly confident that they're right, even as everybody else becomes increasingly confident that the models they use are wrong. The whole thing is an absolute farce.
Your post is misleading: the 95% is the certainty that climate change is man-made. That has exactly fuck-all to do with how accurately can previously created models predict the rate of said climate change.
Those models, by the way, are being updated constantly, as we learn more about climate's behavior. Science isn't un-changing - quite the opposite! Science changes according to what is learned and what experiments show. Unlike religion, for instance.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score:5, Informative)
12th per capita, pre-ceeded by the economic power-houses of:
Quatar
Trinidad and Tobago
Dutch Antilles
Kuwait
Brunei
United Arab Emirates
Aruba
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Falkland Islands
Austtralia.
Ok, Australia is almost a real place, but the rest of them are jokes.
The EU average is less than half of US emissions per capita.
Re:Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:4, Informative)
Economic progress *is* social progress. It allows people to allocate labor and resources to educating their children (and themselves), feeding the hungry, curing disease and curbing pollution.
There is a reason why developing nations are focused on development: it brings a better life to their people. And it's finally paying off in several regions of the world.
Re:Meh - Indeed (Score:2, Informative)
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event
Too late. 50+% of all large (ie. larger than a mouse) animal and plant species on the planet are endangered or worse. 90+% are in decline. The only ones still going are in places we do not like to be, or they have adapted to urban or rural human environment.
We already live in a Great Extinction Event. We caused it and we still don't see it. It is like living in a polluted environment and just taking it as "normal". Or denying that you need glasses to see until you put them on and say "wow! I didn't even know!". Denial is how we deal with things. We haven't really evolved to be rational species - most decisions we make are "gut feelings" and such. Even by those that *want* to be rational.
When we start affecting the microbial life on large scale, that's when we will really fuck up the planet and ourselves. It already started with gut bacteria(thanks to oral antibiotics) resulting in autism, c. diff infections, e. coli.poisonings and related.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:4, Informative)
30 years is the classical climatological period as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. [wmo.int] That is long enough for many cyclic things like ENSO and solar cycles to average out so the long term climate trends are discernible. Of course there are many climatological effects that take place over far longer periods such as the cycles of glaciation/deglaciation that have been occurring for over a million years but a 30 year average is long enough to define the current state of the climate.