Report: Climate change has already hit USA - and time is RUNNING OUT The US government–mandated Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released a mammoth 841-page report on the impact of climate change on the US, region by region, focusing on its effects on water, human health, agriculture, urban life, and more. The bottom line: climate disruption – their term – caused by human activities …
So to sum everything up.
Global Politics are fucked up - no one can agree on anything.
Global Economics beneft about 0.0000000000000000001% of the entire population so it's basically fucked up as well.
Global Population is out of control.
And to top it off we have managed to fuck up the Global Climate or at least now we admit to it.
or is this just the preparatory work for the 1st Global War ?
Is there any chance of having some good news before I die...
[I was going to include religion but that's always been fcuked up anyway]
Not negated at all.. Both Darwin and Malthus are still in full swing, we've just moved the markers around a bit by means of technology, upping the level of "sustainable" in case of Malthus, and changing the factors in "fitness" in the case of Darwin.
The current change in climate has been going on since the last glacial, through the extinction of the Neanderthals, the "Rise of Man", with a nice little break commonly called "the Little Ice Age" which has been judged to have ended just around the turn of the 19th century.
There may or may not be a primary human influence in the current development towards warmer global temperatures. Scientifically speaking the models are simply not accurate and encompassing enough to tell. This is, however, the Unpopular Opinion, and does not get you grants or tenure, so scientific bias does tend towards Political Correctness here.
Either way, our planet has seen worse, and the only thing this whole climate thing really threatens is the comfy Way of the Couch Potatoe. My heart bleeds for them.
>Scientifically speaking the models are simply not accurate and encompassing enough to tell.
Says you. Not that many others.
> This is, however, the Unpopular Opinion, and does not get you grants or tenure
Of two minds here. One is that there is a real risk of groupthink, I agree. On the other hand, if there were credible counter-arguments to the AGW theories, do you really believe there would be a lack of sponsors for that research? Starting with the coal companies* and Saudis?
Bottom line, even assuming uncertainty does it really minimize our risks to do nada while every doubter opines? If the scientists are correct we are moving into an increasingly risky zone with a very long CO2 resorption period. It may make sense to start operating on the assumption that there could be something to all those models, no?
* Speaking of which politically correct Germany is increasing use of coal to satisfy greens' romantic notions of renewables & no-nukes. With the end result being more CO2. Couldn't make this up.
"It's "Global Population is out of control."."
Oh really? I think you'll find it's Third World, not Global Population which is on the increase. So if you think there's an 'out of control' problem, then surely that makes you a hideous racist? All those pesky brown people having more children every 5 minutes? Any answer to that, my eugenically challenged chum?
"Oh really? I think you'll find it's Third World, not Global Population which is on the increase."
This is obviously true in terms of numbers, one thing to remember though is that a first world child consumes many times more energy/resources than a third world child in their lifetime - so there's a strong argument that we in first world countries are equally obligated to reduce the number of children we are having as one less person here has a far greater impact.
Given that we can all agree that someone living in the first world is likely to consume more and have more carbon emissions, would you support making it a criminal offence to migrate from a low carbon economy to a high carbon economy? A couple of years in prison followed by deportation back to the low carbon economy should help prevent these climate crimes.
That's a fair point a/c and you make it well. Nobody is talking about litigation though, however perhaps there is increasingly a place for more voluntarily responsible behaviour (in first OR third world economies) amongst couples who want large families. People have a right to produce children and the idea of capping it is always an emotive subject, however most scientists and sociologists agree that significant population increase at this point is unlikely to benefit anyone unless we very quickly find ways to consume much less.
"Through the well meaning advances of medicine the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been negated."
So you're going to get poor Africans to run a death race? Or are you volunteering to strangle a few yourself?
That suggestion, coming from a smug wealthy white guy, is pretty interesting. Eugenics Guy bought a computer.
"or is this just the preparatory work for the 1st Global War ?"
Missed the first 2, did you?
Joking aside, yes, you can pretty much count on another world war and that's WITHOUT global warming.
Here's the events in progress:
- huge income inequality
- dwindling fresh water from growing populations and economies.
- trade inequality
- sheer population growth
- sheer scale of ignorance and hate
- the coming pandemics (what, you thought that was all solved?)
- religious differences (what, you thought that was solved as well?)
- military technology needing to be tested
- and of course the age old grab for more land, i.e. resources.
- behind the scenes power struggles skullduggery
NOW add global warming.
Even if you deny global warming it won't matter. The wheels are already in motion for war.
Bank on it. You know the international bankers are.
"no one can agree on anything."
All scientists agree that anthropomorphic climate change is happening. The scientific doubt is effectively zero. And has been for well over a decade.
The only uncertainty is about how bad it's going to get and in what timescale...
quote: "All scientists agree that anthropomorphic climate change is happening. The scientific doubt is effectively zero. And has been for well over a decade."
Citation needed. As I have posted several times, I completely agree that the climate is warming up, but to see people constantly claim that all scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is happening is either well-meaning over-generalisation, or deliberate mis-statement. We have been on a warming trend for over 10,000 years, but are still colder than at any point over the last 80 million years.
Which way would you expect the temperature to change naturally, bereft of any human interaction, based upon that observation?
"Scientists" that have been paid by those benefiting from denying anthropogenic climate change don't count.
Remember the lead pollution from leaded gasoline? There were plenty of paid shills, some of them "scientists", that twisted the results of others' research attempting to show there wasn't an issue -- and it worked for many years.
Are you saying we should still allow tetraethyl lead in our gas because a few paid shills, and millions poured in propaganda, tried to convince the public that it wasn't an issue?
> "Scientists" that have been paid by those benefiting from denying anthropogenic climate change don't count.
Most climate scientists are paid as well and primarily by political paymasters that would not like to hear that we were wrong all this time.
Based on past experience and resoundingly unscientific revelations surrounding the "research" in this area, I don't trust a single one of them.
It doesn't help the debate to paint everyone as either for or against whether climate change is happening, a naive and incorrect assumption. That the climate is constantly changing is for most reasonable people a given. To what extent we are contributing to it is still a very open question.
"To what extent we are contributing to it is still a very open question."
To the average Joe? Sure, but then Joe may also believe the earth is only 6000 years old.
The more data that is gathered, the more apparent the current warming trend is related to c02, and our release of it. While you can argue "correlation does not equal causation", and "climate is too complex to model accurately", those claims do not hold up to the preponderance of evidence.
Trying to maintain your claim is like saying "I saw Bob enter the pub with a gun. I heard one shot fired, and when he left, police captured him and found powder residue on his hand. We know that no one else left the pub, and a thorough search turned up no other gun. Bob also has a history of shooting guns in pubs, but I just don't believe Bob fired the gun. Correlation doesn't equal causation, don't-cha-know."
We know the release of c02 has an effect on climate -- there is no denying this. We know the level of c02 in the atmosphere is increasing -- there is no denying this. We know our climate is changing -- there is no denying this. All other proposals for why the climate is changing have been found wanting -- there is no denying this. We have models that show c02 being a probable candidate. Yet Bob still didn't pull the trigger?
> Bob also has a history of shooting guns in pubs, but I just don't believe Bob fired the gun. Correlation doesn't equal causation, don't-cha-know."
You would find it difficult to find a court that would convict Bob of the crime I suspect.
"I can't think of another reason therefore he did it" doesn't cut it in the real world I'm afraid.
That's called circumstantial evidence and there must be a very large preponderance of it to convict someone of a crime, specifically because it is notoriously unreliable.
The real crux of this problem is that people keep saying stuff like "100% of climate scientists say that it is true" and "The debate is over". When I hear scientists saying the debate is over, that's exactly when I start wondering what their angle is. The real actual evidence of CO2 causation is very thin on the ground and is nearly all model-based, models which have never made *any* predictions which bear any resemblance to reality. This is why in the scientific method it is just *not enough* to say this hypothesis fits the facts. Hypotheses must make verifiable predictions and those models just fail over and over and over again to do so.
Hypotheses which cannot make predictions are not worth the paper they're written on and make a poor substitute for proper science.
"'I can't think of another reason therefore he did it' doesn't cut it in the real world I'm afraid."
Lets see: Witness saw him enter the pub with a gun. gun was fired. Suspect has power residue on his hands after leaving the pub. Suspect has history of action. No other individual in the establishment has a gun, nor was another gun found.
That's not "can't think of another reason". That's, "given the evidence, no other reason fits".
Same thing applies to C02 and climate change -- except we have even more evidence with c02 and climate change.
"Scientists" that have been paid by those benefiting from denying anthropogenic climate change don't count..."
Since the vast majority of "scientific" opinions - or perhaps that ought to be scientific "opinions" - are paid by one special interest group or another, and many, mostly AGW advocates by both, your reasoning leads to the conclusion that we can ignore the entire issue and let the underfunded minority who simply want to known how things really work to get on with it.
One fact evident in the article is implicit in that stupid graph comparing two curves in complete different and unrelatable units. On the left, we have a temperature scale with a span of just over 2 degree C. On the right is a scale that is in 0.000001s / unit. The scale ranges have then been adjusted to emphasize similarity by rescaling until the apparent curves match, and so that the upturn looks serious. The most notable lack on the graph is any curve that shows how either of those "ought" to look, and that is because no one on this planet actually knows just what that might be. This debate is about as well informed as a brawl between blind drunks wearing ear muffs (so they can't hear each other) in a dark alley (in case one or more are only visually challenged).
"Since the vast majority of "scientific" opinions - or perhaps that ought to be scientific "opinions" - are paid by one special interest group or another, and many, mostly AGW advocates by both, your reasoning leads to the conclusion that we can ignore the entire issue"
One group has a vested interest in disproving and creating controversy, much like ID and evolution. The other has, for the most part, scientific method. The reason I put "scientist" in quotes, is because most of the deniers do not apply scientific method to the data at hand. They find what they think is an issue in the data (like a warm or cold period), and, just like god-in-the-gaps with evolution, they believe they've blown the whole thing out of the water, without taking all the evidence as a whole. Like standing too close to a Monet, and saying "All I see is dots!".
"Hypotheses which cannot make predictions..."
They have made predictions... and, so far, they've been right. You just don't like the predictions they've made.
"What predictions of climate scientists' models *ever* been proved to be even remotely accurate?"
Look around you.
Does evolution through natural selection predict exactly what lifeforms you're going to end up with? Of course not. What do you expect the climate models to predict? Exactly where, when and what a temperature increase will be? Exactly where and when we will see increased climate volatility? We simply don't have the computational power to do that. But they did accurately predict increased average temperature and climate volatility as c02 level rise. Have these not come to pass? What's next? Are you going to say that evolution isn't real because there are "gaps in the fossil record?"
>Which way would you expect the temperature to change naturally, bereft of any human interaction, based upon that observation?
on geological timescales, (your 80M years) you'd probably be in the right. Revert to mean n all that.
On our 200 year timescale any rapid increase is suspicious, innit? Certainly atmo CO2 increase has been pretty dramatic over that time and totally out of line with "millions of years".
Not everyone needs to agree and I happen to think _qualified_ doubting scientists should be funded.
quote: "on geological timescales, (your 80M years) you'd probably be in the right. Revert to mean n all that.
On our 200 year timescale any rapid increase is suspicious, innit? Certainly atmo CO2 increase has been pretty dramatic over that time and totally out of line with "millions of years"."
Regarding CO2, here are graphs for CO2 levels for the last ~400 million years alongside temperatures for the same period
You'll note that there are points where high CO2 correlates with high temp, and also points where low CO2 correlates with high temps. There are also points where increasing CO2 correlates with rising temps, and points where increasing CO2 correlates with falling temps. I'd especially draw your attention to the points between 250-100Mya; if you follow the 30Myr filter line, we sat around 1500-2000ppmv CO2 (4-5 times more than today), and overall it was indeed warmer than now. However over that period, the first 50My have increasing CO2 (1500ppmv to 2000ppmv) and falling temperatures, the second 50My have decreasing CO2 (2000ppmv to 1500ppmv) and falling temperatures, and the last 50My have increasing CO2 (1500ppmv to 2000ppmv) and rising temperatures.
Over the scale of those graphs, 200 years are insignificant, we can only talk about long term trends. Also, all of those data points are calculated, none were observed. So while I am in agreement that the data from the last 200 years is explicitly more accurate than any calculated paleoclimate data, paleoclimate data does not support the hypothesis that increased CO2 inevitably and immediately causes increases in global temperatures. An increase of 500ppmv (33% extra at the time) somehow failed to increase global temperatures over a 50 million year timescale (250-200Mya), it barely even slowed an existing decline. Claiming it can (and will) dramatically increase global temperatures in less than a century does not fit those existing data sets, and to be scientifically sound, any new theory has to both fit existing data as well as accurately predict new data. Something is not right, and I would be far more suspicious of people deciding to rewrite paleoclimate data to fit the current models, than of people rewriting the current models to fit paleoclimate data.
Anyway, moving on from my rant regarding some less than scientific practise amongst people calling themselves scientists, I think we mostly agree that people should be doing proper science (which by definition includes unbiased research), and also properly planning for the impact of increased global temperatures. Regardless of who's (or what's) fault it is, we're going to have to live in a warmer world, so we'd better make sure we can do so, right?
> "You'll note that there are points where high CO2 correlates with high temp, and also points where low CO2 correlates with high temps. There are also points where increasing CO2 correlates with rising temps, and points where increasing CO2 correlates with falling temps"
All this tells us is that c02 isn't the only driver of climate, and not a single climate scientist will claim it is. But we do know it is one of the drivers of climate. It's ridiculous to think that we can dump endless amounts of it into our atmosphere with zero effect, especially when we can model and observe quite the opposite.
I couldn't agree more. The first time I flew the north Pacific Ocean I thought I was off course one night as the water ahead of me was covered with lights. 50 miles in every direction. A Japanese fishing fleet probably or possibly Spanish. Jared Diamond thinks humanity has a 50% chance of saving the situation we're in now but I'm not that optimistic. I seriously doubt we'll get population under control without a major cataclysm.
I hate to be a bit cynical but I wouldn't expect a committee that has worked so long and hard, with such a strong political leaning toward Warming among the staffers who controlled it, to come up with anything short of a Jeremiad.
As is common in these cases, the baseline is chosen to give a decent increase, but the fact theat Earth has failed to follow the model for the last 21 years seems to have eluded the committee members.
Until there is a real explanation available for the last 22 years of stagnation on the warming front, and not just vague comments about ocean stirring, I won't jump on the AGW bandwagon. I find the model-based science rather dubious, especially as the cheerleaders for AGW regularly tout a symptom such as melting ice as absolute proof AGW is here, only to reverse themselves when the ice rushes back a couple of years late.
We do need to stop using oil, because there's a limited amount of it, and I don't want my grandchildren fighting a war to get the last drops. But dubious science is not the way to do this. We need some serious backbone in the debate, some common-sense and an acceptance that we can build safe nuclear reactors - we have thorium fuel for 5 millennia for those and pollution is much much better than uranium power!
Of course the boffins will follow the gravy. They are no different than anyone else and want job security, ego, whatever.
To put the scientists on a pedestal and suggest they are above such filthy matters as ego and money is naive to the extreme. You just have to look at some of the bitch-fighting that goes on in any university research department to see what it is really like.
That is why we'll always get over-hype of both potential disasters (SARS, swine flu,...) and over-selling of tech (superconductors, nuclear energy, wind energy, solar,...). While there are certainly medical Mega-corps and venture capital shysters benefiting from this, there are also a bunch of scientists scamming for fame and funding etc too.
Bullshit. Pure bullshit.
IF there was any real finagling of the numbers, then some smart dissenters in the committee would come up with the "real facts" and get several million dollars from the petrochemical companies for exposing the lies of the other scientists.
CONSISTENTLY - that simply does not happen. Scientists HIRED by the petrochemical companies do their OWN studies and find quibbles. But scientists pulled from academia that work on these panels simply do not step forward and say "Hey guys, it's all a lie, and let me tell you about it." And collect a huge payday.
And that TO ME is the single most telling piece of the climate change debate...
'But scientists pulled from academia that work on these panels simply do not step forward and say "Hey guys, it's all a lie, and let me tell you about it." And collect a huge payday.'
No, That is entirely correct, because if they did step forward, they would not get a huge payday.
They would get fired.
It's very very interesting that the only voices of dissent that are strident in the academic community are those who are either so damned eminent their jobs are safe, or are already retired.
Remember academic income comes ultimately from government.
I've talked to em 'we always try to roll a climate change angle in to get funding, its part of the job'
Whether or not the AGW theory is correct, or even remotely correct, is one thing. The pressure to support it is very very real.
Seems like your illusion of scientists has been threatened.
Just like us regular folk, scientists need to eat, pay the rent and would like to afford children, cars and other luxuries. For this they need the filthy lucre and a job/funding/whatever - just as we do.
Even those that start with lofty ambitions of putting truth ahead of anything else are soon faced with practical concerns. It is unfair on scientists to expect them to behave any differently from anyone else.
Then too, they have egos and ambition the same as anyone else. There is HUGE politics in any research institution. Peer review sometimes becomes :"you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". Your research supervisor won't accept a theory that discredits what he's been doing for the last 20 years.
As an example, consider the bunfight over tectonic plate theory in the 1960s.
The earth sciences departments were controlled by people who had grown up believing and supportint the in-situ theories that mountains just rise up in place and are eroded down. They'd written papers and PhDs on the subject. Their whole professional life - including much of their self-worth was based on the in-situ theories
Then a new generation of people want to do PhDs exploring the new-fangled tectonic plate theory that completely rubbishes the in-situists life work. How does he feel? Threatened. Does he care about "truth"? No. He does everything he can to chop the upstart off at the knees.
The same goes for those people down at the EAU Climate Research Unit. All their funding, papers, public relations depends on climate science alarmism. Of course they will be tempted to over-egg the pudding.
What the "corrupt scientists" hypothesis fails to explain is why they're all, consistently, corrupted into the same camp.
Considering how much money there is in the opposing camp, that's just inexplicable. And, I personally think, fatal to the hypothesis as a whole.
how much money there is in the opposing camp?
How much MONEY there is the the AGW camp I think you mean.
The great green money machines is everybody's favourite bandwagon except those who have to pay for it.
And that isn't big oil and gas. no matter how many windmills you plant at whatever obscene profit you are government mandated to get, you wont replace oil as the driver for all off grid primary energy and gas as the best backup (in the absence of hydro) for intermittent renewables.
Academia loves it! Trillions of dollars of taxpayer funding channelled into the effects of AGW, or ways to reduce emissions, and very little into disputing it or confirming it because the 'science is settled'
Politicians love it, especially those with global ambitions because it justifies centralised control of society and energy.
Business loves it because it is a reason to scrap old product and introduce new and with luck, they will get de facto competitive advantage by being the first in the green marketplace and get their competition banned under some green regulatory instrument. One thinks of low energy lightbulbs..
Oh there is a consortium of quasi conspiratorial nature involved all right and its got big business money behind it, but it ain't the sceptics. Its the greens, who are fully paid up servants in the great cause of Profit.
Your comment about the UEA CRU strikes a chord. Aren't the the one that were alarmed that nobody could find evidence that the troposphere was warming like the said it had to? Did they revise their theory to reflect the new facts emerging? Like hell, they did. They sent out missives demanding people put together evidence to prove their theories.
Scientific misbehaviour? Fraud perhaps?
"That is why we'll always get over-hype of both potential disasters (SARS, swine flu,...) and over-selling of tech (superconductors, nuclear energy, wind energy, solar,...). "
The media are seriously to blame for much of this. You never read a news paper or watch a broadcast that emphasizes "things are great" or "40 Years After: How the Club of Rome Blew It," or similar non stories. Murder rates are emphasized as opposed to non-murder rates. In London the per capita homicide rate is lower than the rate CO2 is increasing. Sad, determined, minority activists are more story-worthy than millions continuing to live their lives. Media is not only entertainment, it provides politicians with "problems" with regard to which, they can be seen to be "doing something". AGW is brought to you for your amusement, not your edification.
> I hate to be a bit cynical but I wouldn't expect a committee that has worked so long and hard, with such a strong political leaning toward Warming among the staffers who controlled it, to come up with anything short of a Jeremiad.
Yet the only complaint that the very well resourced Cato Institute can come up with is "actually, fewer people might die in the resultant heat-waves". If the science were really that faulty, they would be all over it. So why aren't they?
> Until there is a real explanation available for the last 22 years of stagnation on the warming front,
You mean the last 22 years of a gradually increasing global temperature, as part of a ~100-year upward trend? Or am I reading the graph in the article wrong?
Any discussion on Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Global Warming (you forgot the C part - otherwise the warming is quite pleasant) degenerates into a religious discussion to make the operating system wars look rational and clear headed.
Your comment on computer models is a very good one. I am not aware of any models, at any time, producing real results that have successfully been validated against the real environment. Yet the latest computer model is always trumpetted as evidence of even worse global warming than the last.
I don't think we need to stop using oil, but we do need to slow down it's use by replacing it where we can. Artificial oil was produced in WW2, so why don't we start doing it now?
The other thing that will slow down use of oil is, as you point out, nuclear power. Electric cars are no point, since they use just as much energy at the power plant as they do in oil. But if we used nuclear power, suddenly it makes sense.
Unfortunately it doesn't work like that.
The synthetic oil developed in WW2 was made from coal and is energy intensive in making, meaning either you use more oil not less just to make fake oil or you go back to coal in power stations to provided the needed energy, which is worse than oil for pollution.
Of course more nuke stations are an option but one that will never float since the politicians would have to take a u-turn after all that Fukashima scaremongering.
The only real viable alternative is growing your fake oil (rapeseed etc) but since on any real scale that would necessitate removing vast amounts of land from farming actual foodstuffs, it's not a great idea either especially long term when you figure in drought etc which will mean even less foodstuffs again and less fake oil leading to both food and oil shortages.
"Until there is a real explanation available for the last 22 years of stagnation on the warming front"
You mean the apparent slow down in the rate of warming when looking at the figures from a very specific average surface temperature measurement method? That has already been largely explained.
Firstly that the data for that method wasnt complete:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/global-warming-since-1997-underestimated-by-half/
And secondly that the remaining small slow down in the rate of surface temperature increase has an explanation - the oceans have been warming instead:
See http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/feb/12/global-warming-fake-pause-hiatus-climate-change
and
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-warming-pause-trade-winds-pacific-ocean-study
and
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
I am not convinced that the available data clearly show there is currently ongoing global warming (anthropogenic or otherwise). Have a look at the USHCN data adjustments over time:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/06/ive-been-waiting-for-this-statement-and-the-national-climate-assessment-has-helpfully-provided-it/
All this man-made CO2, returned to the atmosphere after many years underground, is bound to cause a blip in something somewhere. The biggest blip appears to be political, with every government now wanting to control all CO2 production, which basically translates to control of every industrial process and every use of all energy, and maybe even breathing. Whew! All that control in the hands of our government betters, I am sure they have good intentions.
Anyhow... as I was saying... the trees. More CO2 = bigger, better, healthier and more apples for me! etc. etc. etc.
I don't blame climate scientists for chasing the grants that governments seem only to keen to hand out (for the right reports, of course), but it is important to note that in Canada, the courts have ruled that all government scientific reports are "comment" and not factual. Which means I keep a large grain of salt nearby anytime a government "scientific" report is published, and so should everyone.
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