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John Mason at 17:35 PM on 12 October 2013A rough guide to the components of Earth's Climate System
Link to NOAA's ONI page added and a screengrab of part of it dropped in above to overlay graphic :)
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TonyW at 17:12 PM on 12 October 2013Ocean In Critical State from Cumulative Impacts
The state of the oceans is scary. But why, oh why, do apparently scientific reports keep emphasising the political limit of 2C/450ppm? Where is the current science that says anything up to 1.99C is not too bad, but 2C is terrible? Ditton 450ppm. I read something on realclimate recently which pointed at 1.9C being seen, in the past, as the lower limit of a small range of temperature rises that would consign Arctic sea ice to history. That temperature has surely been superseded by a much lower one. And the oceans are already acidifying faster than for millions of years; I can't see it being OK to limit CO2 to less than 450ppm. The urgency is even greater than this report tries to instill. -
jmorpuss at 16:55 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
I think if climate sience looked at reality and not debated theories and computer generated models we could all live in a better world. Do all climate change researchers get provided with the time frames when this is taking place ?LINK
And here in Australia I'd like to know if Atlant was running when Queensland got flooded? John Cook should be able to let us know http://www.australianrain.com.au/technology/howitworks.html
So as I said these links are not promoting a theory they are real and going on as we speak.
Moderator Response:[RH] Shortened links that were breaking page formatting
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Tom Curtis at 15:58 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
JRT256 @20:
"Recovery from the Little Ice Age is probably one of the causes of Global Warming. To say that this is magical is possibly nonsense. Clearly if there was a cause of the LIA, then the cesation of this cause will result in recovery."
This sort of spurious reasoning is what gives "magical thinking" plausibility. Essential to JRT256's reasoning is an assumption that the "cause of the LIA" has in fact ceased to operate. But if he has not identified that cause, he cannot know that it has ceased, continued as before, or even redoubled in strength. For all he knows, climate sensitivity is far stronger than he imagines, but a redoubled strength of the "cause of the LIA" has slowed the anthropogenic global warming.
The only way around this quandary is to actually identify the cause of the LIA; and to then identify what it is currently doing,ie, to go beyond vague formulations in terms of "recovery from the LIA". Failure to do this, ie, simply assuming that the "cause of the LIA" is behaving in the way that best suites your intellectual prejudices amounts to magical thinking.
Curiously, when the actual causes of the LIA are looked into, it is found that the primary cause of the LIA was a period of greater than usual volcanism creating an aerosol veil sheltering us from the sun; which indeed did cease in the early twentieth century and the cessation of which did contribute to the early twentieth century rise in temperatures. Of course, volcanism has been renewed since then, and the rise in temperatures in the late twentieth century is opposite in trend to that which would be expected from natural (solar and volcanic) causes.
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Bert from Eltham at 15:54 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
DSL it all reminds me of epicycles and the problems of turbulent fluid flow. Throw in enough epicycles or non sense variables and one can model anything we do not understand.
I find it absolutely amazing that people will rubbish computer models that are based on known physics and yet grasp at any 'magic' models that are based on short term curve fitting.
These same ignorant people will then accuse scientists of the very same fallacy they are committing all far outside the error bars that they cannot even begin to evaluate or contemplate. Bert
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DSL at 14:47 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
JRT256, there's nothing in the article or in the comment stream that provides an overwhelmingly obvious antecedent for the target of your use of "explanation." I certainly would not have expected you to assume the reader would identify 'global warming over the last fifty years' as the target. Rob and Bert explain why. I also have a hard time accepting this quasi-periodic wave is independent of rapid and deep changes in the climate system. The physical mechanisms through which the wave is propagated are changing. To imagine that this wave persists through that change in such a way as to be used to reliably project a future hiatus in surface temp requires too great a suspension of disbelief. Ironically, Curry works on a project that seems ideal fodder for her uncertainty monster.
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Rob Honeycutt at 14:29 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
JRT256... What would also be required here is an explanation as to why CO2 doesn't operate as we expect, and observe, to explain current warming.
In other words, you can't just dismiss the well understood radiative physics of greenhouse gases. You also have to take into account a whole host of things that are predicted results. Cooling stratosphere with a warming troposphere. Arctic amplification. Etc.
And again, for natural variation to be a rational explanation, you'd also have to show that global temperature has varied at least as much and as rapidly over the past 1000-2000 years. That, so far, has been shown not to be the case.
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Bert from Eltham at 14:14 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
JRT256 the article you referred to in 18 is an attempt to describe 'natural variation'. It is for the Northern Hemisphere only and it does not propose any real physical mechanism for its affects. Just some vague hand waving of so called multi temporal and spatial interactions. It does not account for the linear increase in temperature due to anthropogenic CO2. It does not disprove AGW due to the increase in atmospheric CO2. For the analysis to work at all the linear AGW signal has to be subtracted from the data.
What is does do is show that AGW is not due to 'natural variation'! The opposite of what deniers are claiming. Bert
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william5331 at 13:58 PM on 12 October 2013Ocean In Critical State from Cumulative Impacts
http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2010/12/fisheries-policy-lets-change-tacks.html
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JRT256 at 13:50 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
DSL: Re #21 Did you bother to read the article that you are commenting on?
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JRT256 at 13:42 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
DSL: Re #19 I thought that was obvious.
Well, the natural variation discussed in the paper is occuring but we had no idea of the causation. If this explaination is correct, we now understand the causation. Before we understood the causation, it was unexplained natural variation. But, it was still natural variation that existed, not magic.
With new science happening all of the time, doesn't this also apply to other unexplained natural variation as well? -
DSL at 13:40 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Aye yai yai, JRT256. Take it to the appropriate thread:
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JRT256 at 13:29 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Recovery from the Little Ice Age is probably one of the causes of Global Warming. To say that this is magical is possibly nonsense. Clearly if there was a cause of the LIA, then the cesation of this cause will result in recovery.
One of the hypotheses of the cause of the LIA is the Maunder Minimum in the Sunspot cycle. This would also mean that the cooling did not effect only Europe (an idea that appears to be the Lamp Post theory). I note that Wikipedia lists some global evidence with citations.The same could also be said of other causes. The point is not what the cause was but rather that if there was a globe wide cause of the LIA, only the cesation of this cause is all that is necessary for the recovery and a return to nominal temperatures.
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DSL at 12:57 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
JRT256, a "reasonable explanation" for what?
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JRT256 at 12:46 PM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
OTOH, with new science happening all of the time:
http://bit.ly/15ZXaRCperhaps natural variation is a reasonable explaination.
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jmorpuss at 11:44 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
"In a time of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. - George Orwell" The truth will set us free http://www.thrivemovement.com/the_code-new_energy_technology The way to control the massed is to control knowledge so all we get is propaganda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda Here's a bit of history that may through some light on why we are in this hole of confussion http://educate-yourself.org/ga/RFcontents.shtml
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Rob Honeycutt at 11:36 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
joeygoze... What you fail to recognize is that, for each one of the papers you list, there are close to 100 others that do make such connections.
On natural variation, the very point to multiproxy reconstructions of the past 1000+ years is to look at natural variation relative to the trend of the past 100 years. There are a dozen or so of these studies and everyone of them shows that the warming of the past century is unprecedented.
Now, I frequently ask people such as yourself: Where is a multiproxy reconstruction that contradicts these conclusions? The fact is, there are none.
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Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
joeygoze - I see you've been reading the denial site notrickszone, as those appear to be the first 10 links from one of Gosselin's posts.
However, the actual content in those papers really doesn't match Gosselin's rhetoric, does not contradict the general view of AGW. As but one exemplar: the second link, Stephen Po-Chedley and Qiang Fu 2012, is a discussion of errors detected in the satellite temperature record. If those errors are real, and are properly accounted for, the satellite data is in far better agreement with surface temperatures - and provides additional support for anthropogenic warming. In fact, if they are correct about the errors in the satellite record, arguments from the 'skeptic' producers of some of that data (Spencer and Christy) is considerably weakened. Clearly that paper wasn't actually read or understood when compiling the list...
Many (most?) of Gosselin's links are from PopTech's list - a cherry-picked list of papers (and op-eds) that he (mis)interprets as possibly (in PopTech's opinion) contradicting AGW, despite in several cases objections from the authors of said works. They do include some works that directly disagree with AGW - including several from Scafetta (curve-fitting), from W. Soon (over the top misrepresentation), etc. And many of those have been refuted/debunked.
Link-bombing (as in Gossilen's post) only works if you don't actually read the links, or don't consider that even with a few cherry-picked articles, the vast majority of the work in the field finds those views to be unsupported outliers. If you feel that there are significant objections, I suggest you discuss them directly, rather than posting bare links.
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tmac57 at 10:24 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Beautifully written gpwayne.I pulled 5 quotes from the article that should go down in climate science history. Thank you
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Trevor_S at 09:18 AM on 12 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
#5 Jason B
A good analogy would be an overweight person eating a chocolate eclair and then cursing themself, saying "Oh, no, I couldn't resist the temptation, now I've eaten it and it's too late to go on a diet". Sure, having eaten that eclair they will now have to work harder to achieve their weight goals, or else they will forever be further from that goal than they would have been had they not eaten that eclair with all else being equal, but that doesn't mean there's no benefit in working on their weight problem from that point forward.
A better analogy might perhaps be you chopped your arm off in a moment of hallucianitory insanity. You ignored that you knew it would make things worse for you but none the less, Murdoch etal told you it was "the shizzle". Sure, superb surgeons can rattach it and you will get some function back (Geoengineering) and if you are rich (Annex 1 nations) you might get back better use then someone who can't afford the best sugeons (developing world), none the less it isn't going to return to "how it was", there is too much forcing for that to occur.
I still see people expecting Government to do the heavy lifting for them, blaming Government for their own emmissions. It's long past time to blame others and we have to start blaming the people who look out at us from the mirror. We are the emitters, we are the obese, the smokers (insert whatever analogy works for you). It's nonsenseical on the one hand to keep emitting, while imploring Government to stop us, that's like asking your mother to tie your shoes for you because you're to lazy.
We do need Government to act to stop the free rider problem BUT we can start. We can act, we can cut back, we can apply peer pressure. We can not turn the A/C on, we can not drive, we can stop flying etc etc. Demand side reduction is the only thing that might mitigate the damage we've done, while still proceeding with supply side change.
If Government acted tomorrow with supply side changes, it would take decades to roll out the necessary infrastructure to ensure substantive emissions reduction and this article brings home the urgency of acting now.
So, what are the options ? Keep emitting while we wait for someone esle to do something on our behalf ?
Professor Kevin Anderson (Tyndal Climate Centre) explains it nicely here in this lecture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U
I am not holding myself up as a role model, just pointing out it can be done. Four years ago I gave up my job, we moved to a milder climate, in a "cheap" (housing) rural area. We are off the grid for power and water, stoped consuming gee gaws from China (cutting their emissions for them), stoped flying etc. I live off a small stipend from invesments, not welfare.
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Ken in Oz at 08:52 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
"Deus ex Machina" is the crucial plot element in the climate science denier's version of the climate story; just when it looks like they might have to eat their words some new element will emerge that fixes it all and they can say "told you so". It may be God loving us so much we will be let off from having to live with the real world consequences of our actions, even though we've known about the big one since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Or it may be bioengineered trees that suck CO2 out of the air and sequester it so well we can burn as much coal and gas and oil as we like. Or all the smart and worthy people will colonise Mars, where global warming really is "good" and there are no natural ecosystems for greenies to obsess over; those that have to stay behind can serve a useful role in paying for their migration to a better world.
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joeygoze9259 at 08:45 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Dare I jump into the shark tank here, one premise I find alarming is that there appears to be agreement that there is no body of primary research that discusses natural variability, solar influences, temperature reconstructions that do not jibe with man induced global warming hypothesis and other topics. I am not making any ad hominem attacks, not insulting anyone, just listing primary research from per reviewed journals. I list 10 papers here but there are hundreds of primary research works that present interesting evidence to consider.
(-snip-)
Moderator Response:[DB] Links lacking context snipped per the Comments Policy.
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Paul D at 06:48 AM on 12 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Contrarians aren't intrested in getting a scientific or factual result.
They are interested in the argument, winning or neutralising it.
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seeohtoo at 23:50 PM on 11 October 2013A rough guide to the components of Earth's Climate System
at #27, clarification on #26: there needs to be a biosphere arrow pointing at the ocean.
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One Planet Only Forever at 23:39 PM on 11 October 2013A rough guide to the components of Earth's Climate System
John, I agree that overlaid charts are a very good presentation of Global Surface Temperature and ENSO, but I still strongly recommend a reference be provided to the NOAA History of the Ocean Nino Index and that the explanation of the derivation of the chart presnetation from taht data be provided.
The current link on the article points to a site that mainly provides "speculative" information regarding the ENSO (forecasts). I did not find a link to a clear explanation for the chart values of Ocean Surface Temperatures. The NOAA link in my earlier comment (#2), explains the way the numbers in the table are determined. Also, there are links from the NOAA page to other relevant infromation for the benefit of people "... who wish to learn more." (the end of the opening statement of your article). Tom Curtis has provided a different chart in (Comment #9) but a link to the explanation of how it was derived would be required if it was used.
Anyone who does wish to learn more will probably come across the NOAA data and a critical thinker would question why the values on the chart currently linked to do not reflect the more thoroughly presented and explained data in the NOAA table. I was curious about the difference and went on a quick search for the answer from the IRI page and did not find what I was looking for. The links led to presenations about the "speculation related to future ENSO. There is no explanation of how the values on the ENSO chart are determined. This can easily lead to the an unjustified claim that the presentation is somehow "fudged". It is important to make things difficult for the deniers and skeptics among us who will try to focus on what they see as inconsistencies between data (any apparant inconsistency is all they need to substantiate a claim). The worst of that group will deliberately try to claim that inconsequential inconsistencies are proof that the data has errors in it and is just being deliberately manipulated. And the gullible of that group will need no more justification of the claim than the "appearance" of the claimed inconsistency.
So I strongly recommend pointing to the NOAA ENSO data rather than the IRI page about "speculation regarding ENSO" that shows an unexplained chart, even if charts are a preferred presnetation.
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Tony O at 22:59 PM on 11 October 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #39
I guess that makes me a denier, Type 5. Our civilization is in it's end game, doomed. Perhaps something better will rise from the ashes, but the transition is going to be horrendous.
But I might be wrong, perhaps it is not too late. And even if I am not, then I would still prefer not to race to our doom. We spend milllions on a single old person keeping them alive for a few more years or maybe only a few more months. What price then, on all of humanity for a few more decades?
Yes this does become self fulfilling at some stage. Carry on as we are and we will not only see the fall of civilization, but the extinction of man as well.
What we need to do to mitigate what is ahead is in many ways the same as what we need to do to cope with what is ahead. The more we mitigate and prepare the more that can be saved.
We can act. Or we can go extinct.
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Alexandre at 22:27 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Brendon at 19:35 PM on 11 October, 2013
Anything But Carbon (ABC) became a cliché among contrarians.
As an attorney, I would never want to b in their position: "I have no idea who it was, but in spite of all the evidence, I just want to say that my client didn't do it!".
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Johnny Vector at 22:25 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
It's not always necessary to have a physical explanation for a correlation to find meaningful explanatory power. The correlation between the tides and lunar position was known long before the physical mechanism, for example. Likewise, there is a (counterfactual) situation in which "natural variation" with no additional explanation could be a meaningful argument. If one could show that there have been century-long variations in the distant past that are equal in magnitude and frequency content to what we have seen over the last century, but that these variations were washed out in the reconstructions done so far, then one could argue, even in the absence of a physical theory, that what we're seeing now could be due to the same effect (whatever it is).
Of course there is no evidence of any such variations, so that is a purely hypothetical situation. And even then, what it would mean is the answer is "we don't know", not "aha, see, it's just natural!".
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Alexandre at 22:23 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Akin to the magical natural cycle is the magical negative feedback argument, which I heard recently: "if the last decade didn't warm as much as before, there must be a negative feedback lurking somewhere".
Unfortunately for everyone, there's no evidence of neither, and plenty of evidence of the ever-worsened greenhouse effect.
BTW, the magical negative feedback seems to be the holy grail of the last contrarian real scientists, like Spencer or Lindzen. Good luck for them. I just wish they wouldn't be so loud before they found it.
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Brendon at 19:35 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Joanne Nova attributes the warming to "Something other than CO2", but she's just not sure what.
Then when I explained that she had not presented any science to rebut the attribution studies, nor had she provided any evidence to show something else was to blame, I was placed into permanent moderation.
http://itsnotnova.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/novamod.png
This seems to be a pattern on Nova's forum.
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chriskoz at 19:29 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
This post portrays deniers as some kind of "irrational people" and tries to compare their rationale to religious superstition. Comparison may sound accurate but it is not fully adequate IMO. The reason is: the religious institutions around the world do accept AGW. Take an example of Vatican. Pope John Paul II said as early as in 1990, that global climate change is real, caused by humans, and that we should take action to slow and stop it. Pope Benedict XVI confirmed it. Lately, the populist Pope Francis has strengthen and clarified it, by saying: "All nations must focus on a rapid transition to renewable energy sources and other strategies to reduce CO2 emissions". I cannot comment about other religious leaders because I don't follow them, but I certainly see no correlation between anyone's religious beliefs and their climate denial. So, comparing denialism to some kind of religion does not do justice to geniunely religious poeple who understand the science and their supernatural world of God starts were science ends, which is perfectly reasonable to me. In such context, I would rather call the deniers "irrational heretics", esp. when Pope Francis' techings are in stark contrast with thier claims.
There is another term/explanation, which you did not mention & to which Ben Ka@1 hinted, which better characterises/explain climate denialism - special interest group bias, namely fossil fuel industry lobbists, or so called "conservative" think tanks. The bias is so large that it skews the rationale as much as we've seen. Some heavily vested lobbists and so called "public relation specialists" are the top figures behind those "natural variability" theories. They don't believe in those theories - they are just "selling the flies of doubt" as Germans would say. Such people can only be described as professional liars. The crowd that follows and repeats the lies as "alternative theories" on WUWT or such blogs, are poeple who for some reasons are unable or too lazy to verify the "skeptic claims". As I said, they are "heretics" following the heresy inseminated by special interest groups. God does not need to be involved here.
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rugbyguy59 at 17:10 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
One aspect of natural variation deniers tend to ignore/deny is natural variations of CO2 are vitally important to past climate change. In many respects AGW is nothing more than a variation on an explanation by natural variation. Naturally, more CO2 warms the planet. The fact the CO2 is rising due to us is really the only anthropogenic aspect of the CO2 explanation.
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Matt Fitzpatrick at 16:44 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
This post isn't criticizing attribution of global warming to specific natural phenomena. It's criticizing attribution to "natural variability" or "natural cycles" or whatever, because these claims are so vague as to be untestable therefore unscientific. The number of natural variables we would have to test to disprove this "hypothesis" are virtually limitless: clouds, volcanoes, planets, stars, pirates, and on and on.
Your claim, for instance, that part of 1975-2000's warming can be attributed to ENSO is specific and testable. This post takes no issue with a well-stated hypothesis like that.
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Klapper at 15:39 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
(-snip-).
Moderator Response:[DB] No new participation on other threads until you finish your interaction on this one here.
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rader5 at 15:26 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
So when it comes to the philosophy of all this. The burden of proof indeed lies with the claimant. If the pro-AGW side says recent warming is caused by C02, they have to show a robust model which justifies their claim. If the anti-AGW maks *ANY* claim, they have to provide justification of that claim. The nutral position is 'we don't know', not 'natural variablity'.
Moreover, we expect justification to be sufficiently robust. When someone asks, "What explains the formation of the solar system?" It is not enough to say, "physics". Similarly, it is not enough to say "nautral variability". Either side will take the sum of the evidence provided (along with their own biases) and come to a conclusion if the evidence justifies the claim. Most will say it doesn't. But as has been pointed out in this article, the anti-AGW side provides very little evidence to show that the current warming is due to 'natural variability'. On the other side, the pro-AGW have gone out of their way to show it most certainly *is not* natural variability. Could it be the sun? No. Could it be volcanos? No. Could it be the oceans? No. Could it be the clouds? No. etc. etc. etc. Could it be any combonation of those? (First: how would you know? Need a model!) No. The other side has no model which justifies their belief. This type of raw belief can be described as many things (e.g. a base axiom or faith) but it's not clear any of these are ever applied to the types of claims we are dealing with. -
ajki at 15:14 PM on 11 October 2013Ocean In Critical State from Cumulative Impacts
Link to "Fisheries: Hope or Despair?" should be changed to:
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/Pitcher-Cheung.pdf
Moderator Response:[JH] Link fixed. Thank you for bringing this glitch to our attention.
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Ben Ka at 15:08 PM on 11 October 2013Why climate change contrarians owe us a (scientific) explanation
Excellent article. I "face-off" against the deniers online all the time. To back up my claims, I'll post links to peer reviewed studies, to this website, and others like it. I am always respectful, and though I do admit to being a tad condescending at times, I never resort to name calling or ad hominem. The deniers on the other hand, almost every one of them, do use ad hominems, are insulting when proved wrong, and when they finally do cite their sources of information, said sources are almost always denier blogs which are supported by energy industry, or conservative think tanks, sometimes both. Of course on occasion they might post a study by a legitimate scientist that denies global warming, but I take thse with a grain of salt, knowing that the vast majority of studies prove GW/CC is happening, and caused by human actions. Last night I even had a denier use your website to support their argument. He linked to your websites trend calculator in an attempt to explain the current plateau, which caused a good laugh on my end. He even attempted to use Schmidt/Ridgwell's study to refute ocean acidification, when a simple reading of the abstract states that CO2 is causing the acidification. LOL, sometimes I wonder why I even bother debating them, but on the plus side, I am learning more on the subject simply by doing the research to debunk their claims.
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Tom Curtis at 11:26 AM on 11 October 2013Ocean In Critical State from Cumulative Impacts
The links for Bijima et al, and Ateberhwan et al lead to the wrong papers. I have not checked the other links.
Moderator Response:[JH] Links fixed. Thank you for bringing these glitches to our attention.
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JasonB at 11:09 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
TonyW,
I disagree, however, with some other commenters, that it is never too late to take action.
I didn't say it will never be too late to take action, and I don't think anyone else did either. What I warned against was saying "it's too late now".
Presumably, positive climate feedbacks could potentially become forcings in their own right. At that point, nothing we could do would have the slightest difference longer term.
That's precisely what I addressed when I said "It is possible that a tipping point will be reached at some point along that line but there's no point basing our actions on the idea that it's "2 C or bust". The overweight analogy would be like saying "Oh, well, I've eaten that eclair, I'll might now die of a heart attack in 30 years because of that, so I may as well not bother trying any more"."
It is hypothetically possible that at some point we will pass a point of no return. It's highly likely that we won't know that point when it happens, it will only be apparent with a great deal of analysis and hindsight. If we pass that point and nothing we do from then on will make a difference, there's no point in assuming that we will. We assume that we won't pass such a point, and if we don't, we gain. If we are wrong and we do pass such a point, then at least our efforts will have delayed it.
And there really is nothing we can do now that will make the slightest difference in the longer term, for a suitable definition of "longer". That doesn't mean that our efforts aren't worthwhile.
We'd only have adaptation left as a strategy, if adaptation were at all possible at that point.
Adaptation doesn't get easier if we allow the climate to get worse. It isn't better to say, for example, "Oh, well, we passed the 2 C threshold, let's give up on trying to mitigate and just adapt", because adapting to 2.5 C is easier than adapting to 3 C, and so on. The costs of climate change are a monotonically increasing function of the degree of climate change; it may be discontinuous at certain (unknown) points, where it suddenly jumps up a lot higher due to passing a tipping point, but it will always be more expensive and more difficult to adapt to if we allow it to get higher regardless of how high we have allowed it to get.
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Riduna at 10:50 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
James Hansen has frequently warned us, with his usual prescience, that a rise in 2°C above the pre-industrial is likely to be achieved by mid century and constitutes dangerous global warming producing an increased incidence of climate extremes. Hence his admonition on the need to keep average global surface temperature below +2°C.
More recently (2012) he has shown that the Gaussian distribution of heat is shifting to the right and as explained by Dana Nuccitelli, the consequences for climate, humanity and other animals are not beneficial.
Why do we continue to ignore the findings of science the advice scientists or find it surprising when oft repeated?
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Alpinist at 10:19 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
I can’t help but be reminded of a post over at Tamino’s Site that concluded with:
I’ll continue to do what I can, come hell or high water. Expect both.
(http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/hell-and-high-water/) -
scaddenp at 09:24 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
Terranova - well the obvious action is reduce GHG emissions. The tricky bit is what methods do governments have to do this that are politically acceptable to their electorate. CO2 and black carbon are by far the most important emissions and furthermore they are more sustitutable for than say CH4. If you want to pursue this discussion however, perhaps it would be best to look for a more appropriate. I cant speak for Rob, but to me, the simple, direct and effective solution is ban on building more coal-fired power stations (unless they have full CO2 removal). Let the market work out the best alternative. Coal industry (except for steel) gets a 30 year sunset, better than asbestos got. Of course the right-winger would scream stuff about "freedom" and so many countries would have look at carbon tax or trading schemes instead which are a whole lot more complicated.
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TonyW at 08:45 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
It's more bad news. However, all projections are, in the end, estimates of the future, not hard predictions. That's why it isn't too late to take action to mitigate global warming. I disagree, however, with some other commenters, that it is never too late to take action. Presumably, positive climate feedbacks could potentially become forcings in their own right. At that point, nothing we could do would have the slightest difference longer term. We'd only have adaptation left as a strategy, if adaptation were at all possible at that point. -
Terranova at 08:13 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
Rob Nicholls @ 6
I am interested in what "actions" should be taken and what effect they will have. I assume you mean limiting GHG emissions (and I am glad you didn't focus on CO2 solely.)
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Rob Nicholls at 06:50 AM on 11 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
Jason B, I couldn't agree more. We don't know exactly what the effects of 2 or 2.5 or 3 or 3.5 degrees C rise in temperature will be, but it seems very likely to me that the more we can slow down or limit the rise in temperature and ocean acidification, the more time we will give ecosystems, species and human societies to adapt. We urgently need to act now to prevent massive damage (and we should have acted decades ago), and every year of inaction probably condemns future generations to worse suffering, but I can't imagine a situation in the next 50-100 years in which action on global warming would be "too late" in the sense that it wouldn't do any good. Even if there is a several degree rise in temperature, accompanied by large increases in chronic hunger among humans and widespread extinction of many species, efforts to limit GHG emissions may still buy time to allow for adaptation to new climates and prevent a lot of further suffering and save many species from extinction.
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JasonB at 15:52 PM on 10 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
malamuddy @ 3,
the frustration of knowing that we should have acted sooner and may be too late now
Although I appreciate the sentiment, we should be careful not to say it's "too late now", because that feeds into another denialist meme (the final step along the path from "It's not happening" through "It's not us" then "It won't be bad" and "It's cheaper to adapt").
A good analogy would be an overweight person eating a chocolate eclair and then cursing themself, saying "Oh, no, I couldn't resist the temptation, now I've eaten it and it's too late to go on a diet". Sure, having eaten that eclair they will now have to work harder to achieve their weight goals, or else they will forever be further from that goal than they would have been had they not eaten that eclair with all else being equal, but that doesn't mean there's no benefit in working on their weight problem from that point forward.
Likewise, we may reach a point where it becomes impossible for us to limit warming to 2 C, say, but that's not an argument for inaction — it's still better to limit warming to 2.5 C than 3.0 C, or to 3.0 C than 3.5 C, and so on. It is possible that a tipping point will be reached at some point along that line but there's no point basing our actions on the idea that it's "2 C or bust". The overweight analogy would be like saying "Oh, well, I've eaten that eclair, I'll might now die of a heart attack in 30 years because of that, so I may as well not bother trying any more".
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John Mason at 15:17 PM on 10 October 2013A rough guide to the components of Earth's Climate System
#26 - three hydrosphere arrows. The top one is pointing at some ocean :)
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chriskoz at 12:34 PM on 10 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
I don't have access to the full text my comment on the results is just a best guess. So, looking at this article & the author's website, I deduce the average anual temperature data for RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 scenarios were calculated from a model run and the "cut-off" dates were shown when the model runs above historical variability until 2005.
I think this presentation is somewhat incomplete because the clear cut-off cannot be determined reliably as a single model predictive power is small in short timescale.
I would rather prefer to see an ensemble (such as CMIP5) run and the range (of say 1-sigma uncertainty) be shown as the possible cut-off date. Such presentation would give me better perspective, in adittion of being a better response to usual deniasts' trolls.However, (Anual Temp) is the only one aspect of climate change. Other aspects, like increased droughts & floods (that are predicted to affect my SYD neighbourhood) are not shown but they are more serious and delta Temp, IMO. For example, the news of a record hifgh 39 C for Sydney today, brought by tonyabalone@2 is not my biggest problem. The bigger problem is that SYD (in fact the entire East Coast of AUS) is experiencing serious drought (I don'r remember any rain for last 2-3 months) which makes the conditions for all species (including all my garden) so difficult. One day of 39 C wouldn't be that bad (it would go as weather variability) but the underlying drought is the reason most of NSW has been declared as "extreme" or even "catastrophic" fire danger by RFS.
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malamuddy at 12:21 PM on 10 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
This, more than any study I have read about, brings home to me the precariousness of our global situation, the frustration of knowing that we should have acted sooner and may be too late now, and a burning resentment towards those who know what we face but, to further their own greed, continue to lie and obfuscate in order to convince our politicians not to act.
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tonyabalone at 11:58 AM on 10 October 2013Global warming – a world of extremes and biological hotspots
While a one day weather event is not climate it is however worth noting that Sydney today is expecting a maximum temperature of 39 C. This will be the hottest day experienced in October and very very warm weather for mid Spring! What does the summer hold for us?
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