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One Planet Only Forever at 13:37 PM on 14 December 2013South Scores 11th-Hour Win on Climate Loss and Damage
@ wili,
The scientifically established 'temperature increase of significant concern' is 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial levels (the 1800s).
In Copenhagen the global leaders signed on to the limit of 2 degrees because it was clear that the lack of action over the previous decades by the highest per-capita emitter to change their ways had made it 'impossible' to meet the 1.5 degree limit.
As mentioned, because of the continued deliberate lack of action by the largest per-capita emitters since 2009 it is now very challenging to meet the 2 degree limit.
Nero fiddling while Rome burns is nothing compared to what the people benefiting the most from the burning of fossil fuels and tearing down of forests are doing to the planet. They are basically like Nero gaining wealth and enjoyment from dropping napalm on a burning planet.
And the most absurd aspect of this is that the burning of non-renewable fossil fuels ultimately cannot be continued anyway. Humanity has a few billion years of living to look forward to on this amazing planet. For the sake of the future of humanity, and all other life, this lazy wasteful damaging moment in human history needs to be ended sooner rather than just a little later.
The popularity of benefiting without the consequences is a real sweet deal…for the ones who win the wars and battles to get to benefit the most. It is a very rotten deal for the rest of the current population and for all the future generations of humanity.
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william5331 at 06:09 AM on 14 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
You mention Cryosat-ll. As far as I can find, they still haven't reported the ice volume for Sept 2013 so that we can compare it with Sept 2012 and see if ice volume has also increased 60% as did ice extent. I understand there is some problem with September associated with ponding water on top of the ice but even the figures for August and October for 2012 and 2013 would give us an approximate figure to compare. Why does the ESA (European Space Agency) which operates Cryosat-ll not produce daily updates for volume as does NSIDC for extent. If the satellite is in the normal 90 min orbit, that means that it passes over the Arctic 16 times a day, each time over a different path. Surly that is enough to give a pretty good estimate of ice volume in real time.
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Mal Adapted at 06:07 AM on 14 December 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A
BTW, Composer99, there's a preview button on the Basic comment form. It looks like a magnifying glass over a page.
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Mal Adapted at 06:05 AM on 14 December 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A
To add to Composer99's comments: individuals who are reducing their carbon footprints are to be applauded, but won't by themselves solve the AGW problem. That's because AGW is a Tragedy of the Commons. As Composer99 suggests, lifestyles will change sufficiently, only when burning fossil fuels is made un-economic by government regulation and/or taxation.
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wili at 04:37 AM on 14 December 2013South Scores 11th-Hour Win on Climate Loss and Damage
"To have a good chance at staying under two degrees C, industrialised countries need to crash their CO2 emissions 10 percent per year starting in 2014, said Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester.'
And, of course, 2 degrees C is way too high. So what is the level of emissions reduction required to avoid, say, 1.5 degrees?
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Rob Honeycutt at 03:59 AM on 14 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
meb58... Yes, WV is a stronger greenhouse gas but it's presense is temperature dependent. I don't believe the ice melting would be what would increase WV, but rather the rising temperature. Freshwater evaporates faster (or requires less energy to evaporate) than saltwater, but I would imagine the difference is probably minimal enough to not have a significant impact on the process.
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meb58 at 01:55 AM on 14 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
...from a non-scientist...as I understand it, water vapor is a more powerful green house gas than CO2 or methane? If so, does fresh water or highly diluted sea water evaporate faster than 'typical' sea water? The rapid artic ice melt is alarming, but doesn't some of the melt water feed back as water vapor at some point in the hydrlogic cycle?
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Rob Painting at 19:32 PM on 13 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
I would add too, that the current behaviour of the Antarctic sea ice is influenced by the present state of the ocean-atmosphere circulation. The current negative (cool) phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is likely assisting the growth of sea ice, but may reverse when the IPO moves to its positive (warm) phase. This can be seen in the modelled trends from Meehl (2013):
.......and the models vs observations from the UK Met Office:
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nigelj at 12:47 PM on 13 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
Rob Honeycutt @3, I agree. The antarctic sea ice is essentially climate neutral, but the arctic certainly isnt. People with open minds can see the antarctic sea ice issue is a very weak sceptical argument, so people who persist with it must have ulterior motives.
On your comment about the arctic, this is a big sort of regional heating effect. I believe the northern hemisphere is also warming more than the southern. Im no climate expert and this may be a naieve comment, but as far as Im aware these temperature differentials can alter pressure systems, winds and currents.
Arent we altering virtually everything? I dont beleive you can actually fully model something so complex. I think its madness to invite changing these patterns.
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Rob Honeycutt at 06:12 AM on 13 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
The other big difference between the Arctic and Antarctic has to do with albedo effect. The change in planetary albedo that comes with Arctic sea ice loss is significant, and it's something to be very concerned about. But there is almost no change in the Antarctic sea ice minimum, and thus there is little to no change in planetary albedo at the south pole, positive or negative.
Deniers keep focusing on the Antarctic sea ice maximum as if it actually means anything at all. The maximum occurs during the late southern winter when there is very little sunlight hitting the pole, and thus any increase has a very small albedo effect related to it.
Something I've never seen is a chart of planetary albedo over time.
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ubrew12 at 06:11 AM on 13 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
Is it acceptable to claim that Antarctic sea ice is 'increasing' from zero? Prior to 1979, when NASA begins its accounting, reconstructed sea ice was much higher than after 1979. As Arctic sea ice extent has been collapsing in extent in the last 30 years, Antarctic sea ice extent mostly collapsed in the 30 years prior to 1980. In any case, that's what I'm pulling away from this article by Tamino, in which he reconstructs both Polar sea ice extents all the way back to 1880::
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/history-of-arctic-and-antarctic-sea-ice-part-1/
Moderator Response:[RH] Hotlinked URL.
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OPatrick at 05:49 AM on 13 December 2013Why is Antarctic sea ice growing?
Here, there is a much stronger seasonal ebb and flow to sea ice coverage as over 80% of the sea ice area grows each autumn-winter and decays each spring-summer.
With the recent drastic reduction in summer Arctic sea ice extent isn't this contrast now outdated? Last year the summer ice in the Arctic was below 25% of the winter extent.
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Composer99 at 00:57 AM on 13 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
To take scaddenp's comment and elaborate it a bit, in no way do we need to view global warming as civilization-threatening to be motivated, even strongly motivated, to take action to mitigate it at a global level.
All we need is to have the following convictions:
- That mitigating warming, and preventing future warming, by emissions reductions, etc., is less expensive than adaptation/coping with the consequences of warming. Personally speaking, based on the probable consequences between 2050 and 2100, as far as I am concerned we have surpassed that point. Thus, mitigation/prevention, even very rapid mitigation/prevention, is the preferable course of action.
- That, if we are willing to consider the interests of others (in securing the basic necessities of life in a stable manner, and in securing occasional or intermittent access to luxuries) as being equal to our own, we have a moral obligation to reduce emissions in order to reduce the severity of the consequences of warming, which the evidence so far quite clearly shows will fall most heavily upon those least able to adapt to them.
I do not think either of these are in any way radical notions.
(Not to say that global warming could not be civilization-threatening if left unchecked; it very well could. My point is that you don't have to see it that way in order to support taking action on a society-wide scale.)
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David Kirtley at 12:49 PM on 12 December 2013Behind the Lines: Herschel's Discovery of Infra-Red
Very interesting post! I love learning more about scientific discoveries of the past. Looking forward to more posts in this series.
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scaddenp at 12:47 PM on 12 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
At no point before Bill chimed in, did anyone suggest climate would end civilization. He begins by attacking a strawman argument. It is a bizarre position to suggest that we should only take action on climate change if it was a threat to civilization (which his scenario over say 100 years would be, but still...). We should take action because it is the rational thing to do from point of view of both cost and risk. It is also the appropriate moral action from the point that those most affected by change are not the ones who are causing it.
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Tom Curtis at 12:21 PM on 12 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bob Lacatena @29, you are correct about the balkanization of knowledge which is characteristic of our age, and that it makes us more vulnerable to a breakdown in society. I think you are incorrect in your estimate of the population loss that would be required to bring about that catastrophe. Except in areas of cutting edge research, the knowledge base is duplicated across several major nations, or groups of nations. Specifically, the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, and now China and India all now have sufficient knowledge to allow for the recovery of civilization without much loss of current knowledge if any of them survive largely intact. What is more, as casualties from global warming will be predominantly in poor, underdeveloped nations, they are also the nations (or groups of nations) most likely to survive with few casualties. If 10 or 20% of the world's population is lost, most of the losses will be in Africa with least in the most developed nations. Further, the missing knowledge, if any, following a 10% populatin loss, will be highly specialized, and consequently have marginal impact on world economic production.
The same cannot be said for a 90% loss, which of necissity must hit all nations very hard. Therefore, a 90% loss - ignoring the other impacts - does have the potential to end our civilization. Never-the-less I think sufficient knowledge would remain even then to survive as a civilization, if not at the advanced levels previously achieved, then at least at a technological level equivalent to that of the 1950s.
I think the far greater threat actually comes from the risk of sustained economic decline; and the end of substantial trade. Our civilization is critically dependent on complex trade networks. If these collapse, so will also the high standard of living that allows so many of us to devote so much time to learning. If all must grub for food in subsistence, or near subsistence farms, there will be no engineers or scientists to sustain the knowledge. Any event, particularly an ongoing even such as OA, ocean anoxia, and sustained very high temperatures which can knock out >20% of the population is also likely to knock us into sustained (multidecadal) negative economic growth, and potentially knock out the majority of the trade network, forcing each region to sustain its own population. The problem will not just be in the population loss, but in the ongoing conditions that caused that loss in the first place.
The end product may well be a fall back to a medieval level of technology, with a few advanced holdouts. Whether that counts as the end of our civilization or not, I think, is academic.
Further, I think that any event that can so stress the worlds nations is also a substantial risk of triggering major wars and potentially an all out nuclear exchange. In that respect, economic stress without population decline presents a greater risk. An all out nuclear exchange represents, of course, and a very high threat of extinction for our species.
Finally, although I regard Bill's comments as panglossian, I do not think it is fair to characterize him as a dissmissive. There are a range of rational views on climate change, from those that consider it a major problem but not a threat to our civilization or species, to those that consider it a threat to both. The threats to the later are, given the present state of knowledge, risks - not certainties.
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Jonas at 12:14 PM on 12 December 2013Behind the Lines: Herschel's Discovery of Infra-Red
I am very grateful for all of the graphics done/presented on sks:
I reposted them many times over: 1 illustration can tell so much ...
(I wish I were a millionaire: then I could donate more to sks ...). -
Bob Lacatena at 07:21 AM on 12 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bill, you missed my point.
If you actually think the world can recover from the loss of 90% of the population, you need to re-evaluate things. I don't think we could recover from the loss of 20%, maybe even 10%.
Modern society is like a hive mind. Very intricate knowledge is squirrelled away in various people, and passed on in a stuttering variation on an oral tradition. Through schooling, apprenticing, trial and error, and experience, people get to understand one minute facet of how our society works, from international finance to aerospace engineering to oncology.
If you remove too much of that at once, basic services, like power, food production, processing and transport, and other things will devolve, and people won't be able to handle it. I think that far, far less than a 90% population loss will be needed to cripple civilization because of how very complex our society and its use of technology has become.
But even if you don't agree with that... you are a dismissive, even if you don't think that you are. If you have no sense of fear or urgency, because you beleive that we can overcome everything, simply because history shows that for the past 100 years we have done so, then... you are a dismissive. You dismiss the problem, not because you don't believe it exists, but because you believe it isn't large enough to worry you.
That is a serious problem that is facing us all, because there is a time limit, and there is a point after which it will be too late to take relevant action. More importantly, every year's delay makes the action that we will ultimately have to take than much more painful.
It just astounds me that dismissives are guaranteeing the one outcome that frightens them most, and are avoiding the path of rewarding (both economically and socially) growth that renewables and a say-no-to-fossil-fuels would bring.
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nigelj at 04:56 AM on 12 December 2013New Video: Making the Plio Scene – What the Past tells us about Sea Level
Doug Hutcheson @2. The interesting thing is the book After the Ice is written by an archaeologist and agw sceptic, but then the sceptics will probably say hes not a "genuine" sceptic....
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william5331 at 04:43 AM on 12 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
As the Arctic warms and more storms (low pressure systems) occur in the Arctic, the Arctic Oscillation will be positive more often than previously. Winds will more often be toward the Arctic rather than away. While this warms the Arctic, it takes heat away from lower latitudes which may explaing the temporary apparent cessation of warming of the atmosphere. After all, most of the sensors are in mid latitudes, not in the Arctic.
By the by, it should be amusing, the year after the year there is zero ice in September in the Arctic. There will probably be a recovery of some sort in this following year and no matter how small or big it is, the climate deniers will be able to claim an infinite ice recovery. (something divided by zero = infinity).
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jdixon1980 at 01:57 AM on 12 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
Here is a direct link to the paper mentioned in the NYT article:
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jdixon1980 at 01:55 AM on 12 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
I'm sorry, only the first link above has anything to do with the "pause"/"slowdown" - maybe PFTBA link should be snipped.
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jdixon1980 at 01:53 AM on 12 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
Any thoughts on these recent MSM pieces on the "pause"?
A NYT article saying that the pause can be largely attributed to the phase-out of ozone depleting chemicals that also happened to be strong GHG's. Then, practically in the same breath, it goes on to say that the HFC's that replaced some of the banned/phased-out ozone depleting chemicals are also strong GHG's. The missing link that would make a cogent story is that the HFC's are not as strong GHG's as the chemicals they replaced, but confusingly, the author says nothing about that.
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-perfluorotributylamine-long-lived-greenhouse-gas.html
An article about perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), an electronics testing / heat transfer agent chemical, which is apparently the most potent GHG of them all. I include this as MSM because I heard about it on the radio last night (I think I was listening to WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station) - it always catches my attention when I passively hear climate "news" on the radio or TV because I'm so used to seeking out most of it online. I'm having trouble figuring out if anybody knows how much PFTBA there is floating around up there. Wiley Online only seems to have Geophysical Research Letters through 16-Nov-2013, and I believe the above link says that the PFTBA article published 27-Nov-2013. I suspect the overall effect of PFTBA is probably tiny compared to that of excess CO2 because of far lower concentration in the atmosphere, but wouldn't want to assume.
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Composer99 at 00:48 AM on 12 December 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A
Bother - make that appareciate appreciate. (Move along, nothing to see here.)
(If there is a list of people suggesting the addition of a "Preview" option in the comment form the next time there is a user interface upgrade here, add me to it.)
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Composer99 at 00:44 AM on 12 December 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A
Trevor_S:
Widespread counter-cultural movements were launched in the 1960s & 1970s predicated on the notion that voluntary personal action/activism would be sufficient, as a substitute for the large-scale organization and legislative/regulatory efforts of trade unionists and suffragettes of prior decades, to radically transform the world.
We can say with a high degree of confidence that such efforts failed spectacularly, and follow-up efforts (e.g. punk-style activism in the 1980s, or the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s) which also avoided extensive social mobilization or any particular effort to influence the legislative or regulatory environment have also failed.
It is also clear that there are a large number of people who are making every effort to reduce their personal carbon emissions, including quite a few regular participants at Skeptical Science. Global carbon emissions continue to increase, despite their best efforts.
It is also clear that there are a large number of people who are not merely lazy or complacent while being aware of the problems posed by global warming, but apathetic or actively hostile to the notion that they ought to reduce their carbon emissions.
As far as I can see, without a change in the legislative/regulatory environment among major carbon emitters, the trajectory of carbon emissions is not going to change. Changing the regulatory environment doesn't demand lifestyle changes from the citizenry, only vocal support. The lifestyle changes will come. You don't have to accept the facts of global warming to appareciate, say, that switching to renewables for electricity will save you $$ when there's hefty carbon pricing on coal.
TL,DR: Both the article you are commenting on, and your post, appear to amount to blaming people for Wanting Nice Things. That might be satisfying, but as far as I can see it is ultimately unproductive as a method of reducing emissions on a societal scale.
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chriskoz at 23:13 PM on 11 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
Time to update the top right widget guys, to 6HB/s?
It maybe a silly comment however I cannot help but saying the main science (i.e. IPCC and even widget now) underestimate AGW according to ignorant statistics. The best experts, e.g. Hansen, Stefan and now Kevin Trenberth, are saying "the better we look into the climate the more sensitive it appears to be". Even our own CW2013 provide some more evidence. Perhaps it's time to revise all Earth sensitivity parameters, less than 2 months after the releae of AR5!
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adamski5807 at 19:26 PM on 11 December 2013Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage
Here is a poll demonstrating the public's sheer ignorance of the facts regarding the Iraq war. On issues that challenge Power (war, climate change, alternative economic systems), educating the public on the truth is persona no grata for the 4th Estate for the Propaganda Model. Only about 6% of the UK public is aware of the Iraq death toll's order of magnitude. http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Iraqi_death_toll_survey_June_2013.pdf -
adamski5807 at 19:03 PM on 11 December 2013Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage
Smith @22. Big deal. Is GDP a good measure of progress? -
Trevor_S at 13:57 PM on 11 December 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A
From the article, "Thanks for Killing the Planet Boomers"
it’s hard to imagine our politicians coming together to make the kind of wholesale changes to our society and economic structure necessary to bring global emissions down to a sustainable level.
So he (as are many others) are continuing to prodigiously emit while they wait for others to stop them be it with law, fiscal impost or technology ?
There are plenty of things you can do to cut back considerably on your emissions now: live in a milder climate, no flying, no meat eating pets, install renewables, stop buying so much "stuff", no car, lower your beef consumption and replace it with veg, etc. I would suggest one of them would not be living in New York or Las Vegas (of all places) before that, as per the author. I shudder to think how much CO2e he outsoruces.
It seems to me comentators like this (and they are legion) are expecting some sort of devinve intervention to sort it out, refusing to moidify their lifestyle, to ameliorate their emissions. Bad enough we get the "burn, baby, burn" from deniers, let alone the equivalent action from those who understand the consequences of AGW. Buying a reusable shopping bag just doesn't cut it.
The person doing the emitting is the person looking back at you from the mirror in the morning. You stop emitting, there are less emissions. Everyone has an excuse as to why they don't reduce and this is then replicated by Government inaction.
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Doug Hutcheson at 13:54 PM on 11 December 2013New Video: Making the Plio Scene – What the Past tells us about Sea Level
Excellent resource to link to, when fighting the blogosphere wars. Of course, the contrarians will only point to it as proof of yet another conspiracy ...
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:51 PM on 11 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
Ken in Oz,
I agree with what you have said, but many would not. Not because they can justify their opinion. Just because accepting this understanding would not be in their interest.
Efforts to help people better understand any issue are indeed helpful, but there will always be a portion of the population that is unwilling to better understand something when 'it is likely not in their interest to better understand it'.
What is unfortunate is how greed can cause people to want to believe what cannot be justified. Greedy people can always find fault with 'things that would show how unacceptable their desired pursuits are'.
This issue is a great case study of the power of greed to affect the way people think, and its power to affect what they are willing to investigate more deeply and actually better understand.
There have been many excellent presentations of what is being observed (not the forecasts, just the observed facts to date), that clearly indicate the flaws of claims that are made against the need for humans to stop burning fossil fuels so rapidly. They are made here, on other websites, and are even presented in mainstream media. Yet the unjustifiable claims continue to get repeated. Popularity clearly does not correlate with rational justification. The power of greed to affect people's behaviour is very significant. That is what the really greedy people among us count on.
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John Hartz at 07:39 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
From the SkS Comments Policy:
No dogpiling. In the interests of civility and to enable people to properly express their opinions, we discourage 'piling on'. If a comment already has a response, consider carefully whether you are adding anything interesting before also responding. If a participant appears to be being 'dog piled', the moderator may designate one or two people from each side of the debate as the primary disputants and require that no other people respond until further notified. On topic comments on other matters not being discussed by the primary disputants will still be welcome.
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Ken in Oz at 07:27 AM on 11 December 2013Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows
It's been unfortunate that surface air temperatures are seen as the definitive measure of change to our climate; global heat content seems to be measuring more direct, actual change to the climate system. Keep at it Dana; like some metaphorical version of Ekman pumping, the understanding that the oceans are where most of the heat is (still) going and that there has been no 'pause' is gradually being carried deeper into the ocean of conscious and unconscious thinking and discussion of climate change.
As for surface air temperatures, I though Foster and Rahmstorf did very well at showing that the 'pause' is an artifact of natural variation over an ongoing warming trend. Seems like even one or two more la Nina years than el Nino during a period of 15 years can and would create the illusion of warming speeding up, slowing down or pausing.
I'd like to point out that the 'pause' is evidence of ongoing global warming; up (more el Nino) and level off (more la Nina) is clearly indicative of warming. It would need to be up (el Ninos) and down (la Ninas) for warming to have 'stopped' or 'paused'. Up, level off, up level off, in staircase/Escalator style is warming.
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scaddenp at 06:29 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
At risk of dogpiling. Photosynthesis dramatically drops in efficiency at around 32C and basically shuts down at 37C. And then there is the problem of water see Dai 2010. (seriously, look at the map from Dai). Both add up to considerable less food available than today - triggers for previous collapse of civilizations. No amount of technology beats thermodynamics. I strongly doubt all civilizations everywhere would completely collapse but extremely bad things would happen needlessly if we let climate change too quickly.
You say you know technology and human nature. How well do you know those civilizations that did collapse? A lot of technology is concentrated in skills of very few - how much disruption would it take to fracture that skill base?
What economic studies exist show that is economically advantageous to transition now. The costs of mitigation are less than costs of adaption but we dont do so. Why? Because voters will believe any sort of comfortable lie rather than accept the need (as Milton Friedman pushed) to pay for externalities. We are not paying the full cost of coal. We are leaving that to future generations to pay. We need pricing on coal so that it stays in the ground.
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Rob Honeycutt at 05:45 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bill said... "We will have time to adapt."
I beg to differ. If you look at the ice core record, the climate system can make very abrupt changes with far less purturbation than we're currently imposing on the system. Look at the Younger-Dryas. A climate shift equal about to moving from Atlanta to New York in a decade or so.
The problem is, we don't know what causes those abrupt shifts and we don't know when they might occur.
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Rob Honeycutt at 05:40 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bill... What's the old saying? "A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."
As Bob points out, you're missing the big picture. And Bob is only pointing out a few of the complicating factors. You also have to consider that human population is going to be approaching 10B right about the same time things start to get bad. We already see social unrest when grain prices rise and bread becomes unaffordable to those in poverty. Amplify that and you've got some serious global problems. It's horrendous to see people starving in parts of Africa. Imagine that but with numbers approaching a billion or more. This is not something that technology is going to solve.
Sea level rise is also not just a matter of moving coastlines. The worse problem is the amplification of storm surges. We already see this with a small amount of sea level rise and larger storms. Make that a meter of SLR and storm surges are going to extend much further inland, also making habitation anywhere near a coastline influence by tropical storms impossible. Think, the entire US eastern seaboard. Think, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai... this is not in the least insignificant.
When you say worst case of 10C, that's probably as close as one could get to a complete collapse of the world's current ecosystem. That would mean that a good portion of the lower latitudes would be unihabitable due to temperature extremes at various times during a year. With Arctic amplification, that would be much greater in the north. So, it's not just a matter of everyone migrating further north because you're going to have a large number of days during the summer that are also going to be unihabitable due to temperature extremes.
Another element you're ignoring is that, at that level (10C) we'd possibly see the ocean surface go anoxic. Richard Alley explains it here at minute 20:00.
Would humans survive this? Maybe, probably, but nothing like we know today. Likely a tiny fraction of the current human population. And the worst part would be the utterly immense amount of human suffering that would occur in the process.
And the even worse part (worse than worst) would be... it would have been entirely avoidable, at a cost today of 2% of global GDP.
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BillCollins at 05:26 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bob,
I am in no way a denialist or a dismissive. My position is that we should transition to energy and fuels that reduce the impact as quickly as possible. But the most likely reality is that we will not do it until it is economically advantageous to do so. Given the new oil supplies and natural gas coming on line from fracking, we will continue having an economical oil supply for decades to come. I hope that we can produce cleaner sources of energy sooner than that to quicken that transition time. Ultimately people will make decisions based on their pocket books and oil is here for a while. As a species we collectively do not worry about the future. That is reality.
Your Spanish Flu comparison doesn't really hold water. I agree that if we had a pandemic situation that wiped out say 90% of the world, it would takes a few decades to get society back to the functional level where we are now. But we will not lose our technical knowledge. The difference here is that this is a slow moving danger. It is not a tsunami. We will have time to adapt. We will move our cities, our industries, our farms. So there is not NYC, SF, or LA? THe loss of all our coastal cities is a tragedy, but not the end of the world. Of course there will be wars and famine. In my post I never said that we have nothing to worry about. I said that civilization will survive this and prosper.
My position is not in conflict with working to achieve sustainable energy capabilities. On the contrary, realizing that the solution has to be about economics more so than awareness should focus our efforts on where it will do the most good. When people post that in the future we will be living in a Stone Age, it detracts from the validity of the problem and how to solve it by alienating realistic and hopeful people.
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Bob Lacatena at 04:24 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
Bill,
Your story is sadly oversimplified.
- Econimic upheaval... many industries will be affected, either directly (sea level rise, shifting agricultural zones, etc.) or indirectly (changes in transportation methods, power sources, etc.). When economies change, people and sometimes entire cities (e.g. Detroit) lose their place in the economy.
- Refugees and warfare... dwindling/shifting resources always leads to upheaval and violence (see the Arab Spring, as the most recent of a long history of examples)
- Storm damage... climate change will come with greater dangers from storms, which will in turn have an economic and human cost.
- If all of the world's ice melts, and if temperatures go up 10C, we will not still have cities. Sea levels would rise tens of meters. 2/3rds of human population or more would be displaced. Agricultural impacts would be untenable. Food shortages and the resulting, violent social upheaval would be a death knell.
- Of course, you presented a worst case scenario which need not come to pass. The biggest danger from climate change right now is that we have to stop using fossil fuels at some point. If we wait until the costs are too high, then we will need to abandon fossil fuels so quickly that the transition will be anything but painless. My personal guess is that 3/5 of the world's population will simply be cut out of the energy pie, and forced to return to pre-industrial existence. The remainder will have to learn a new life style using behavior changes, frugal energy use, and renewables -- and it will be absolutely nothing like the world we live in today.
What shocks me is the way people think that an 80 year old period of technological stability means that it can never end. Countless powerful human civilizations have fallen over the course of history, many of them as a result of climate change, and yet some people seem to think that imagining such a thing in our case is impossible -- and yet our current society is so precariously positioned that it is frightening.
We are so specialized and interconnected that many people are utterly incapable of surviving in anything but our interconnected society. Imagine what would happen just as the result of something like the outbreak of a Spanish flu, something that wipes out even a small percentage of the population. We do not run a society with much in the way of wiggle room for major industries, jobs and tasks.
Our society and civilization is very, very far from safely grounded. Something as huge as climate change is guaranteed to knock the foundation out from underneath, if we wait too long to address the problem.
I think it's really funny (in a sad way) that Dismissives deny climate change, shouting alarmingly, "Alarmist! What you ask would destroy our economy!" when in fact acting now would incur a small price (10 years ago would have been way better), while delaying any further virtually guarantees the outcome that they use to scare people away from effective and reasonable action.
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BillCollins at 03:54 AM on 11 December 2013Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise
I don't pretend to have any depth of knowledge around climate change, but I do know technology and human nature. For all of you who believe that civilization will collapse, let's walk through a worst case scenario. All of the ice in the world melts. Temperatures go up 10C. We will still have cities. Technology will still advance. It will not happen in a year or a decade. We will not need to move out of the coastal cities suddenly, we will just stop building in them or near the ocean. As older people die, young people will move inland. Yes it is bad, people will starve and be displaced, but it is not the end of civilization. There will still be a few billion well-fed educated people on the planet. We will make it through this with flying colors.
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lennartvdl at 02:16 AM on 11 December 2013Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise
Tom @23,
Thanks for the nice sketch of your risk approach, which I think is quite reasonable. I do have some questions though.
How do you/we best estimate the potential (moral and economic) risks, costs and benefits of (not) investing in adaptation vs mitigation? Or put differently: what would be your preferred adaptation and mitigation policy goals?
For example: should we use the risk of 1.5 meters of SLR by 2100 as a worst-case in adaptation planning, as long as there’s no strong mitigation policy in place? And if so, on what grounds should we ignore the risk estimate of the circa 17% of experts who think there’s a substantial risk of 1.75 meters or more by 2100 under BAU? We have to draw a line somewhere, but why should that be the line?
And what should be our mitigation goal? Should it be the 6% per year global CO2 emissions reductions that Hansen et al recently argued for? What (economic or other) risks would such a goal/policy entail? Or should it be the 50% reductions by 2050 that UNFCCC still has its goal (on paper at least)? What risks would remain with that less ambitious goal, for SLR and other effects, and how do you/we weigh all those risks?
For example: it seems even with strong mitigation there’s at least some risk of more than 1.5 meters of SLR by 2100 and more than 4 meters by 2300. With less mitigation the risks will be higher. How much risk should we as global society accept, and what does this imply for the risks that specific countries, regions and cities should accept, such as small island states, Bangladesh and others?
I hope you could explain some more where your reasoning would lead us, and am certainly willing to explore and discuss where for example Hansen’s prescription could lead us, if your advice would be substantially different from his.
Thanks again for your input, Lennart
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Tom Curtis at 17:01 PM on 10 December 2013Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise
lennartvdl @21, I will concentrate to the upper likely estimate (83% confidence bound) for rcp 8.5 in 2100, as the range of opinions is shown by this graph from Real Climate:
As can be seen, there is a long tail of opinion with the highest value at 6 meters. So, how should this guide us as policy makers (or voters for policy makers). Well, first we recognize that we are not expert, so that our independant judgement based on the evidence we look at is likely to be far more unreliable than that of the experts, both because we have less information, and because we have less experience in the field, leading us to be prone to "rooky mistakes". Second, we recognise that scientists, as scientists are also prone to mistakes; but that they are self correcting at an institutional level. (Ideally they would be self correcting at an individual level, but the history of science shows that to be an ideal rather than a universal reality.) Therefore we focus on the areas of agreement among scientists rather than the outliers.
At that stage, we notice that while there is a long tail, the number of experts in the tail from 2 meters up (14) is less than the number of experts who are lowballing the risk (17 with an estimate of 0.5 meters). The two groups more or less cancel each other out, and we are left with the two central groups (1 - 1.5 meters).
Third, we are cautious, but not overly so in our estimate. Therefore we take the upper bound of the concensus estimates. Hence 1.5 meters.
As an actual policy maker, I would do that more formally, or at least I would get my appropriate staff to do so. I would get them to develop a Probability Density Function of the expert estimates. Further, I would get them to develop cost/benefit evaluations for my nation for a range of adaption responses relative to the range of estimates. I would then attempt to begin the adaption program with the best expected utility given the PDF from the expert elicitation (withing budget). As cost increase substantially with sea level rise, this would result in an adaption response targeted for the upper range of the PDF, but within the main body of upper estimates (ie, most likely 1-1.5 meters). It would be higher for nations like Bangladesh and and lower for nations like Australia; higher for states like Florida, and lower for states like Oregon. I would also need to normalize the sea level rise values relative to expected local rise for a given global rise, as the sea level rise is not the same in all areas.
The concentration you show on upper estimates by the most extremely pessimistic experts is not a rational response to sea level rise. It ignores most of the evidence, and all of the costs of responding, which are substantial.
Finally, I have focussed on adaption because mitigation must have the same policy in response to all the risks of global warming plus OA. As sea level rise is a minor portion of that risk (while still substantial) it has little effect on assessing the need for mitigation. We should be mitigating anyway, even if we thought sea level rise was going to peak at 100 cm, and the ideal level of mitigation would only rise slightly with sea level rises of 3 meters by 2100.
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chriskoz at 12:43 PM on 10 December 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #49
This news may inspire the knucle-head denialists, because their own conservative hero-president attitude:
It's funny how the author's trying to explain with his/er text averything controversial, i.e. latest "GW slowed down...".
Certainly, the Montreal Protocol contributed to e.g. the birth of the meme that James Hansen "over-estimated rate of warming" back in 1988. But the latest hiatus in surface temp increase has little to do with Montreal...
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Leto at 07:20 AM on 10 December 20134 Hiroshima bombs per second: a widget to raise awareness about global warming
Note to the widget programmer. It misbehaves on Firefox. The widget in the sidebar is smaller than the one in the post, and the smaller one repaints only half of the right-most digit as the number climbs. If the number ends on a 3 when first displayed, for instance, the right half of a 3 will stay in place while the left half climbs. It is often not possible to make out what number is intended. The larger in-post version behaves as intended.
It is not simply a total-screen-real-estate issue, because I have Firefox open on a massive screen at present. It may be related to squeezing the widget into the side bar, which is fairly narrow. Happy to send screenshots if needed. -
lennartvdl at 06:22 AM on 10 December 2013Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise
Some more results from figure 2:
- 7 out 72 experts think there's about a 5% chance of 7 meters or more by 2300 under BAU, with the highest estimate about 15 meters.
- 5 out of 72 experts think there's about a 17% chance of 6 meters or more by 2300 under BAU, with a highest estimate of almost 10 meters.
- 3 out 74 experts think there's about a 17% chance of 3 meters or more by 2300 even in the best case, with 3.5 meters as highest estimate.
- 3 out of 74 experts think there's about a 5% chance of 4 meters or more by 2300 in the best case, with almost 8 meters as the highest estimate.
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lennartvdl at 06:05 AM on 10 December 2013Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise
To return to the paper itself: in the conclusion it says that 13 experts (out of 82) think there's about a 17% chance that SLR by 2100 could be more than 2 meters in the RCP 8.5 scenario. So it seems about 16% of the experts think there's a substantial risk of 2 meters or more in the worst-case.
Figure 2 of the paper shows that 5 out of 82 experts think there's about a 5% chance that SLR by 2100 could be 3 meters or more in this BAU scenario, with the highest estimate about 7 meters. So it seems about 6% of the experts think there's some risk of more than 3 meters of SLR by 2100 in the worst-case.
But even in the strong mitigation scenario of RCP 3 three experts out of 84 think there's about a 5% chance of more than about 1.5 meters of SLR by 2100., with the highest estimate around 2 meters. So it seems almost 4% of the experts think that even in the best case there's some risk of more than 1.5 meters of SLR by 2100.
About 50% of the experts think that in this best case there's about a 17% chance of more than 0.6 meters of SLR by 2100 and about a 5% chance of more than 0.7 meters. So even in the best case there seems to be a significant risk of more than 60 cm of SLR around 2100.
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nigelj at 06:00 AM on 10 December 2013Climate Change: Years of Living Dangerously
I think the movie would be good and I agree a personal emotiponal connection is important, as long as the movie doesnt over hype anything.
One of the other issues with climate change is the huge scale of the issue, namely moving away from fossil fuels. I suspect most people struggle with that challenge, and need to be shown a picture of a viable world without fossil fuels.
Once people can see a future, they will relax and be more accepting of change and the costs of change. Right now they are fearful and go into denial or fatalistic acceptance of climate change.
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Tom Curtis at 04:50 AM on 10 December 2013Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise
michael sweet @19, agreed on all points.
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Tom Curtis at 04:47 AM on 10 December 2013Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage
John Hartz @24, I doubt it, although I do not know. Including it, however, would not substantially alter the reported GDP in that, first, it was a small percentage of the oil now being sold; second, much of the illegal funds was obtained by diverting money from the oil for food program, which was accounted for; and third, because it was diverted to private holdings, it would not have had the multiplier effect within the economy that normal trade generates. Indeed, for illegal profits to have made up the difference in the GDP, they would have to be in order of $US 170 billion. That is at least an order of magnitude greater than estimates of Saddam's black market oil sales prior to the 2nd US/Iraqi war. Consequently, while we cannot be certain that the Iraqi PPP per capita GDP is over 100% greater than that prior to the second US/Iraq War, there is little doubt that it is much larger than before the war.
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wili at 04:40 AM on 10 December 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #49
I like the cartoon (I was glad to see it run in our local paper).There were also voices over the last few decades that could have been shown in those boxes expressing greater and greater alarm at inaction in the face of ever-more-clear threats, who also now have to say that it is too late to avoid unimaginably bad and now inevitable consequences of our past inaction. But of course further inaction (which is what seems to be in the cards at this point) will further doom us to even worse consequences.
I see that it looks as though Dana's upcoming piece "Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows" will likely be along something like those lines. -
LiarDenier at 03:34 AM on 10 December 2013Most of the last 10,000 years were warmer
I normally just read this blog for information and am now posting for the first time. Morgan Wright is an active denier who trolls many climate blogs and sometimes pretends to be a climate scientist to state his denialist lies. He actually has his own denier blog at hyzercreek.com/hillofshizzle.htm so be aware because he recently used a lot of information he got from this thread on his blog...he spun the bit about 1855 and GISP2/local proxy his way. Don't fed the troll.
Moderator Response:[JH] What exactly do you mean by your statement, "Don't feed the troll"? As best as I can determine, Morgan Wright has not posted a comment on this thread.
Upon further review, I see that Morgan Freeman did in fact post on this comment thread under a different user name, Steven Foster. Morgan Freeman and his sock puppet have been banned from posting on SkS.
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