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posted by takyon on Thursday June 30 2016, @05:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the too-little-too-late dept.

The Independent reports on an article in Nature (full article is paywalled) (DOI: 10.1038/nature18307) in which the effects of the actions to which governments committed themselves at December's Paris climate summit are predicted. The authors estimate "a median warming of 2.6–3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100" if those policies are followed; they say more drastic action will be needed if warming is to be kept to 2 degrees or less.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by davester666 on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:12AM

    by davester666 (155) on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:12AM (#367887)

    It'll make winters much more pleasant here in Canada.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dingus on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:34AM

      by dingus (5224) on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:34AM (#367890)

      yup, think of all the new mosquito varieties!

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by letssee on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:35AM

      by letssee (2537) on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:35AM (#367906)

      And this is why we are all screwed. Even here in holland people don't really understand all the consequences, while we're probably one of the first industrialized nations to feel the direct consequences.

      But even if you live high and dry you will notice adverse effects.

      - the weather will become much more unstable. We already notice this now.
      - Permanent snow/ice disappearing from mountains worldwide will jeopardize lots of freshwater reserves.
      - tropical diseases moving north.
      - lots of migration (already happening, though not directly caused by climate change) because the living circumstances in tropical regions become unbearable.

      if we don't do anything at all, there's a real risk we'll have a runaway greenhouse effect. (permafrost thawing already causes lots of methane release, leading to a nasty feedback loop)

      • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:41AM

        by davester666 (155) on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:41AM (#367907)

        Just feel the whoosh of that wind going through your hair...

        • (Score: 1) by letssee on Thursday June 30 2016, @09:57AM

          by letssee (2537) on Thursday June 30 2016, @09:57AM (#367928)

          Maybe I'm a cynic. I've met too many people who really think like that to unconditionally believe he's only joking...

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:56AM

        by anubi (2828) on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:56AM (#367910) Journal

        One of my fears is the arctic ice melt.

        I have thought of the arctic ice freeze/thaw to be a thermal stabilizer, transferring immense amounts of thermal energy to maintain a constant temperature. Just as ice in a soft drink does the same.

        Once that thermal stabilizer passes out of its range, it can no longer regulate the upper temperature excursions.

        Higher air temperature also means higher amounts of water in the air, and water has a volumetric ratio of 1700:1 between its liquid and vapor states. This means the airborne water will exert a pretty good sized amount of mechanical ( shaft ) work in the form of blowing winds as it changes state.

        I know my way around a steam table. Thermodynamics tells me a lot of what to expect.

        Screw STEM. Unless you are gonna work for yourself. Get into the building trades. Cuz mother nature is winding up to make a lot of work for you.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
        • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:56PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:56PM (#368080) Journal

          I have thought of the arctic ice freeze/thaw to be a thermal stabilizer, transferring immense amounts of thermal energy to maintain a constant temperature. Just as ice in a soft drink does the same.

          Which incidentally is why most of the near future warming is going to happen in places that used to have snow. That gets glossed over in the predictions. Sure, I grant that this will result in some increase in sea level rise due to the increased melting of ice fields. But there's a lot of profound and dishonest propaganda out there that ignroes that the greatest warming comes in areas that would become much more livable for humanity as a result.

          There's still the normal thermal radiation to space. It goes up as the fourth power of temperature.

          Screw STEM. Unless you are gonna work for yourself. Get into the building trades. Cuz mother nature is winding up to make a lot of work for you.

          This reminds me of one of the hidden observations about global warming. One of the greatest factors in reducing harm from extreme weather is having a developed world society. It turns out that most of the damage from weather is in killing people, not in property damage. And a developed world society knows how to protect people when extreme weather hits. If the rest of the world rose to developed world living standards, and the US discontinued its singularly disastrous flood insurance policies, we would see a large drop off in harm from extreme weather.

          But climate alarmists aren't interested in global prosperity.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday June 30 2016, @01:02PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 30 2016, @01:02PM (#367969) Journal

        - the weather will become much more unstable. We already notice this now.
        - Permanent snow/ice disappearing from mountains worldwide will jeopardize lots of freshwater reserves.
        - tropical diseases moving north.
        - lots of migration (already happening, though not directly caused by climate change) because the living circumstances in tropical regions become unbearable.

        I'll just point out the obvious rebuttals:

        - We don't actually notice weather becoming more unstable. It's always been like this.
        - Mismanagement of freshwater reserves is a far bigger problem than the impact on those reserves from climate change. It's not global warming which is pumping water out of many aquifers at an unsustainable rate.
        - Tropical diseases would have already moved north, if it weren't for 19th century public health initiatives. Tropical diseases are a solved problem. They won't move north into a society unless the society has flaked out and no longer does basic public health.
        - There isn't a lot of need for migration when most places can just move that short distance to slightly higher land. As I noted before, societies are already very adaptable to circumstances like rising sea level. They just move their new construction to land that doesn't flood as much and they have plenty of time in which to move.

        if we don't do anything at all, there's a real risk we'll have a runaway greenhouse effect. (permafrost thawing already causes lots of methane release, leading to a nasty feedback loop)

        The CO2 that would be required for that is locked up geologically in the crust. There isn't enough carbon in oil and coal to do that. I'm not going to waste my time with chicken little bullshit.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 30 2016, @02:43PM

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday June 30 2016, @02:43PM (#368001) Journal

          Yes, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Pay up for details!

          If the article is of such importance, of such great public interest, you'd think a publisher would not paywall it, but would instead offer it freely. It's not like they did the work, not even only the review and editing, or paid for it themselves. But then, academic publishers have been the worst parasites. Ahh, greed!

          Really, the whole subject should be thrown open. Isn't CO2 accumulation and the resulting Climate Disruption and Ocean Acidification, a subject of critical importance to our future, the very sort of thing on which governments should intervene? Can those who passionately hate government agree that there are some circumstances where the public must act, and that the government, much corruption though it has, is still one of the top instruments available to the public for such action? In addition to the obvious problems with keeping important information away from the public, keeping it all locked up helps drive conspiracy theories. Look at the stink over mere emails being kept private. And these are not emails, these are published research papers.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @12:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @12:52PM (#367965)

      It'll make winters much more pleasant here in Canada.

      And tornado valley moving up north too. What fun!

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @06:46AM (#367894)

    By 2100 everyone will be permanently jacked into GooFaceTwit and will never leave their climate controlled homes.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Capt. Obvious on Thursday June 30 2016, @08:04AM

    by Capt. Obvious (6089) on Thursday June 30 2016, @08:04AM (#367915)

    In Copenhagen in 2008, 200 countries decided to try to hold it to 2 degrees C. The Paris talks are going to result in a 3.5 degree rise. Now, the Copenhagen agreement had no plan of action behind it, but the Paris talks should be considered a failure. They failed to reach the stated goal.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @09:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @09:12AM (#367924)

    Water Vapor holds in far more heat than CO2 or Methane. Clouds are considered part of the natural water cycle, and thus not factored in, but this is faulty reasoning because we're pumping a lot of vapor into the sky, greatly increasing the concentration of water unnaturally. Why don't any Climate Change studies factor in all the Cloud Seeding and Water Vapor (steam) releases from our power plants? [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday June 30 2016, @05:39PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Thursday June 30 2016, @05:39PM (#368049) Journal

      Water vapour is indeed an important greenhouse gas. It is accounted for in climate models. Its residence time in the atmosphere is comparatively short. Intuitively it seems likely that artificial sources of water vapour are dwarfed by evaporation from plants, soil and the oceans.

      A warmer, water-rich world subjected to much greater solar radiation than the Earth could indeed be in a state where the addition or removal of a few hundred ppm of CO2 would make little difference to the climate, but this state of affairs does not by any stretch of the imagination apply to the Earth. Another important difference between CO2 and water vapor is that the former has a much longer response time because on Earth it is removed only by slow biogeochemical processes as opposed to the rapid condensation and precipitation processes affecting water vapor. Water vapor responds quickly to temperature changes induced by CO2, whereas CO2 would take thousands of years to respond to a change in the hydrological cycle.

      http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/CaltechWater.pdf [uchicago.edu]

      See figure 6.1 in that essay for the relative contributions of water vapour versus carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect.

      I don't know how prevalent cloud-seeding is, but it is done occasionally in my part of the world. I suspect you are right in saying that climate models don't take it into account.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:11PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 30 2016, @07:11PM (#368086) Journal

    they say more drastic action will be needed if warming is to be kept to 2 degrees or less

    My view is that we should give much higher priority to combat global poverty, overpopulation, arable land loss and habitat destruction due to land and resource mismanagement, and government corruption. Global warming won't get on my radar till somewhere around 6-10 C of temperature increase.

    When anyone pushes limiting global temperature increase to 2 C, they're saying the minor problem of global warming is more important than the huge problems of humanity. Further, the wholly inadequate efforts to date have shown a remarkably harm to humanity (such as doubling electricity costs in Germany and Denmark) which indicate to me that there's a bunch of screws loose among such advocates.

    The advocates for climate change mitigation had their chance to make their case, not just with research, but also demonstration of remedies. They have failed. This whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen.