Climate Change - General Discussion : Read the Mod Note in post #1 before posting

Wanderer78

It's important to realise, even if some of the thinking behind environmental issues such as climate change are indeed wrong, or not wholly right, it's becoming 'clearly' obvious, something is wrong, and radically so in some cases, regarding our treatment to this planet. I'd class it as ignorance to think otherwise.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

The NSIDC paper is from 2009, written after the record low sea ice of 2007. Almost a decade later and we're still waiting to see any major effects of Arctic amplification.

The poleward shift of only 0.8 ° (around 90 km) with a doubling of CO2 is not exactly something to get overly concerned about. Surely that's not what you're basing your argument on?




Again, very slight shifts are forecast in this paper, but even then there are huge ifs and buts with the findings, as conceded by the authors themselves. The model can't even get the present conditions right. Given that the trend in severe hurricanes is slightly downward (as I quoted yesterday) then there really is not much certainty what will happen, one way or the other.

I'm not talking about certainty. I'm talking about risk, and the fact that there is uncertainty is not a good thing, it is a very bad thing. If there was certainty, at least we could prepare for the changes that are going to happen.

On one hand you're acknowledging that climate change is going to cause changes, but on the other hand, you're dismissing all the extreme weather events that are happening more and more often all around the world as though they are all perfectly normal natural events.

Extreme weather events are the kinds of things that can destroy lives and even devastate whole nations. When these extremes become worse than the capacity of those nations to handle them they have a massive human and economic cost.

Munich Reinsurance company announced earlier that 2017 was the costliest year ever for insurance claims associated with natural disasters, over 130 billion in insured damages, and 3 times more than that in uninsured losses.

but it's not just one year, it's an obvious trend (and before you say 'but there are more people in the world/changed land use, the red part at the bottom for geophysical events like earthquakes and volcanos aren't showing the same trend)

Gaoth Laidir

Akrasia wrote: »

I'm not talking about certainty. I'm talking about risk, and the fact that there is uncertainty is not a good thing, it is a very bad thing. If there was certainty, at least we could prepare for the changes that are going to happen.

You've been talking up doomsday scenarios since the beginning, frequently referencing the settled science. Now you're acknowledging the uncertainty. How about acknowledging the negative trend I severe hurricanes worldwide? You haven't mentioned that.

On one hand you're acknowledging that climate change is going to cause changes, but on the other hand, you're dismissing all the extreme weather events that are happening more and more often all around the world as though they are all perfectly normal natural events.

Hang on, climate has always changed. You think that by speaking about a 90-km shift in storm track that this means I should accept that the three 2017 storms YOU brought up are all due to agw? You still have posted no evidence to show that these can be linked, as also claimed by head-the-ball from Friends of the Earth.

Extreme weather events are the kinds of things that can destroy lives and even devastate whole nations. When these extremes become worse than the capacity of those nations to handle them they have a massive human and economic cost.

Munich Reinsurance company announced earlier that 2017 was the costliest year ever for insurance claims associated with natural disasters, over 130 billion in insured damages, and 3 times more than that in uninsured losses.

but it's not just one year, it's an obvious trend (and before you say 'but there are more people in the world/changed land use, the red part at the bottom for geophysical events like earthquakes and volcanos aren't showing the same trend)

The insurance argument again. Last year was a bad year due to the first major hurricane landfalls in 12 years. Yes, there were no US Cat 3+ landfalls since 2005. Not surprising that last year turned out to be a disaster for their bottom line. We're back the same question of attributing these storms, etc., to agw, which you still haven't done.

dense

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

We're back the same question of attributing these storms, etc., to agw, which you still haven't done.

IF catastrophic man made climate change does actually exist, why has no one been able to attribute anything catastrophic to it?

dense

piuswal wrote: »

Quote:
Originally Posted by piuswal View Post
"We are close to the tipping point, where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees [Celsius], and raining sulfuric acid," he told BBC News, referring to the president's decision in June 2017 to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate deal.

just a quote from Stephen Hawkins

Arkasia
"Steven Hawking was a clever guy but not a climate scientist or an astronomer"

I would suggest Stephen Hawkins was a bit more than just a clever guy.

A remarkable physicist, who would have very carefully assessed all the evidence before making such a statement.

Oh he was remarkable. And wrong in this instance by all accounts.

Are there any climate scientists who concur with his "Venus" claim?

I certainly couldn't come across any.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

You've been talking up doomsday scenarios since the beginning, frequently referencing the settled science. Now you're acknowledging the uncertainty. How about acknowledging the negative trend I severe hurricanes worldwide? You haven't mentioned that.

No I haven't. The 'settled science' is the fact that climate change is real and happening, there is still plenty of uncertainty in how the biosphere will react to this increased warming. Never have I said that the consequences of climate change are certain. I have always been arguing on the basis that the consequences of climate change could be disastarous and we should act now to reduce those risks. The potential future could be anywhere from economic damage and population displacements, to civilisation ending, and the timescales for these consequences range from within a few decades, to more than a century from now. You're the one who is so confident that this is all exaggerated and we don't need to act quickly and deliberately to reduce our emissions.

Hang on, climate has always changed. You think that by speaking about a 90-km shift in storm track that this means I should accept that the three 2017 storms YOU brought up are all due to agw? You still have posted no evidence to show that these can be linked, as also claimed by head-the-ball from Friends of the Earth.

All storms now are linked to AGW because AGW is a reality now and all our weather is influenced by it. There is nonsense about 'was this caused by climate change'. Its a mal formed question. The climate has changed, everything is affected by it. In a counterfactual world without climate change, different storms would have formed, the average temperature of the world would be about a degree celcius lower than it is, the ice volume in the arctic wouldn't be 80% lower than it is today.

The poleward shift in storm tracks is thought to be about an average of .8 of a degree per decade. Average, which means that there will be more storms hitting much higher than 90km north, and changes like this have knock on effects elsewhere. Also, it will shift monsoon rains which could have devastating consequences for some of the most heavily populated areas in the world with some experiencing more flooding, and others experiencing more drought.
The point I am making here is there is enormous risk attached to changing the global climate. Destabalizing India and Pakistan by putting the populations under increased environmental pressure could have disasterous geo political outcomes (although the deniers will still pretend that climate change has nothing to do with war or conflict just because these things always have multiple factors causing and influencing them)

The 3 storms I mentioned were examples of unusual storms that have affected us recently, just in the past few months. I could list another dozen record breaking storms that have formed around the world in the past decade, you will probably go through every one and say that they are all within the range of natural variability using studies or reviews that only look at some of the factors and compare them to extreme events in the past, but climate change works by incremental changes. If it wasn't for climate change, 2017 would definitely not have been as warm as it was. Those storms definitely wouldn't have happened when and where they happened and they definitely wouldn't have dumped as much water as they did.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heavy-precipitation

The insurance argument again. Last year was a bad year due to the first major hurricane landfalls in 12 years. Yes, there were no US Cat 3+ landfalls since 2005. Not surprising that last year turned out to be a disaster for their bottom line. We're back the same question of attributing these storms, etc., to agw, which you still haven't done.

The insurance companies themselves attribute these events to climate change. look at the trend. It's not normal. It's not just the headline storms, it's all the weather related insurance claims, droughts, floods, heatwaves, snowstorms. All your handwaving about human factors, land use etc doesn't hold up when you have the control of geophysical claims remaining steady while meteorological claims are rising. The scale of the damage is already enormous and costly in both economic and human terms.
The Stern review warned us of this 12 years ago

Akrasia

The World Bank have released a report today. It looks at the risk of forced internal migration in 3 of the poorest regions in the world by 2050. It doesn't include international migration, only people internally displaced within their own countries.

Their conclusions are that by 2050, in a worst case scenario (Business as usual) there could be up to 140 million internally displaced people as a direct result of climate change, and this would continue to accelerate post 2050 as more parts of these countries become unable to support their population due to a changing climate.

It projects that without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people—or around 2.8 percent of the population of these three regions—could be forced to move within their own countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change. They will migrate from less viable areas with lower water availability and crop productivity and from areas affected by rising sea level and storm surges.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461

If we take immediate urgent action to reduce emissions and slow down climate change and invest in developing countries to help mitigate the effects of climate change, we could reduce this figure by 80%

Even in their best case scenario where emissions are reduced, we're still likely to see 50 million internally displaced people in these regions due to climate change.

The World Bank is highlighting a need for planning now, to allocate resources to help these countries engage in planned mitigation and migration strategies, and these are all essential if we want to avoid conflict and other serious social problems driven by people in desperate need and failed states, but alongside this, we also need urgent global action to reduce emissions and prevent the worst case warming scenarios from happening.

dense

The real agenda is coming through.

"Climate refugees" seeking climate justice.

Pity it took so long.

I recently read an interview with the oceanographer who is said to have coined the global warming phrase, Wallace Smith Broecker.

He discussed the problems and suggested what might be required by way successfully implementing the solutions.

"Well … I mean, it’s going to be pretty hard to devastate the Earth to the point we can’t live on it.

But if we’re ever going to get this thing solved, we’re going to need an international group that has a lot of authority.

It’ll have to be like the Fed, but to manage carbon. That would mean we’d all have to give up a lot of our sovereignty, but I think that’s the only way it would happen.

It couldn’t be the U.N., because the U.N. doesn’t have the power.

They’d have to be able to penalize, they’d probably have to have an army, because cheating would be very, very lucrative.


I’d say it’s one chance in a thousand. I mean, we may get to that.
Maybe China will get so powerful that it can start to dictate.

The usual stuff that no one likes to discuss. How the radical solution might be implemented.

Odd that it seems to not exist on the New York Magazine's website anymore.
Could be just a temporary glitch.

http://www.nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/man-who-coined-global-warming-on-worst-case-scenarios.html

Luckily, the Wayback Archive permits one to read it, glitch or no glitch.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180103003245/http://www.nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/man-who-coined-global-warming-on-worst-case-scenarios.html

Oneiric 3

The World Bank, that bastion of Western supremacy & Neo-liberal economics. I think I will give what they have to say a skip, thanks.

Akrasia

Oneiric 3 wrote: »

The World Bank, that bastion of Western supremacy & Neo-liberal economics. I think I will give what they have to say a skip, thanks.

It's your choice. I don't the world banks' policy of promoting neoliberalism either, but there's a difference between a diagnosis of an illness and a prescription for a cure.

Noam Chomsky often says that if you want the truth about what is actually happening in the world, you should read the financial sections of the newspapers or the Financial Times in particular. Their ideology might be opposed to yours, but they still need to accurately report the facts of what has already happened for their own agenda

Those who Adam Smith called ‘the masters of the universe’ have to understand the universe. They have to have a tolerably realistic understanding of the world that they are managing and controlling. That’s true of political elites as well, but the business world particularly. Also, the business press essentially trust their audience. They don’t have to impose propagandistic illusions to keep the rabble under control.

https://www.ft.com/content/bcdefd38-3beb-3506-b24c-82285ac87f6c

Harry Palmr

300m of Norfolk coast near Hemsby has vanished into the North Sea obviously it would be hard to prove climate change was responsible but it's rate of loss is increasing as the storm surges that hit it get more powerful and frequent.

Gaoth Laidir

Harry Palmr wrote: »

300m of Norfolk coast near Hemsby has vanished into the North Sea obviously it would be hard to prove climate change was responsible but it's rate of loss is increasing as the storm surges that hit it get more powerful and frequent.

Are they getting more powerful and frequent?

dense

Harry Palmr wrote: »

300m of Norfolk coast near Hemsby has vanished into the North Sea obviously it would be hard to prove climate change was responsible but it's rate of loss is increasing as the storm surges that hit it get more powerful and frequent.

The area is historically prone to it unfortunately.

Major damage occurred in 1953 and 2013.

Norfolk's low-lying land and easily eroded cliffs, many of which are chalk and clay, make it vulnerable to the sea; the most recent major event was the North Sea flood of 1953. The low-lying section of coast between Kelling and Lowestoft Ness in Suffolk is currently managed by the Environment Agency to protect the Broads from sea flooding. Management policy for the North Norfolk coastline is described in the North Norfolk Shoreline Management Plan, which was published in 2006 but has yet to be accepted by the local authorities.[11] The Shoreline Management Plan states that the stretch of coast will be protected for at least another 50 years, but that in the face of sea level rise and post-glacial lowering of land levels in the South East, there is an urgent need for further research to inform future management decisions, including the possibility that the sea defences may have to be realigned to a more sustainable position.

A mixture of things make it vulnerable, including land levels lowering over time.

Gaoth Laidir

Akrasia wrote: »

No I haven't. The 'settled science' is the fact that climate change is real and happening, there is still plenty of uncertainty in how the biosphere will react to this increased warming. Never have I said that the consequences of climate change are certain. I have always been arguing on the basis that the consequences of climate change could be disastarous and we should act now to reduce those risks. The potential future could be anywhere from economic damage and population displacements, to civilisation ending, and the timescales for these consequences range from within a few decades, to more than a century from now. You're the one who is so confident that this is all exaggerated and we don't need to act quickly and deliberately to reduce our emissions.

All storms now are linked to AGW because AGW is a reality now and all our weather is influenced by it. There is nonsense about 'was this caused by climate change'. Its a mal formed question. The climate has changed, everything is affected by it. In a counterfactual world without climate change, different storms would have formed, the average temperature of the world would be about a degree celcius lower than it is, the ice volume in the arctic wouldn't be 80% lower than it is today.

The poleward shift in storm tracks is thought to be about an average of .8 of a degree per decade. Average, which means that there will be more storms hitting much higher than 90km north, and changes like this have knock on effects elsewhere. Also, it will shift monsoon rains which could have devastating consequences for some of the most heavily populated areas in the world with some experiencing more flooding, and others experiencing more drought.
The point I am making here is there is enormous risk attached to changing the global climate. Destabalizing India and Pakistan by putting the populations under increased environmental pressure could have disasterous geo political outcomes (although the deniers will still pretend that climate change has nothing to do with war or conflict just because these things always have multiple factors causing and influencing them)

The 3 storms I mentioned were examples of unusual storms that have affected us recently, just in the past few months. I could list another dozen record breaking storms that have formed around the world in the past decade, you will probably go through every one and say that they are all within the range of natural variability using studies or reviews that only look at some of the factors and compare them to extreme events in the past, but climate change works by incremental changes. If it wasn't for climate change, 2017 would definitely not have been as warm as it was. Those storms definitely wouldn't have happened when and where they happened and they definitely wouldn't have dumped as much water as they did.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heavy-precipitation


The insurance companies themselves attribute these events to climate change. look at the trend. It's not normal. It's not just the headline storms, it's all the weather related insurance claims, droughts, floods, heatwaves, snowstorms. All your handwaving about human factors, land use etc doesn't hold up when you have the control of geophysical claims remaining steady while meteorological claims are rising. The scale of the damage is already enormous and costly in both economic and human terms.
The Stern review warned us of this 12 years ago

There's just too much nonsense in this to even begin to respond to.

Gaoth Laidir

Akrasia wrote: »

The World Bank have released a report today. It looks at the risk of forced internal migration in 3 of the poorest regions in the world by 2050. It doesn't include international migration, only people internally displaced within their own countries.

Their conclusions are that by 2050, in a worst case scenario (Business as usual) there could be up to 140 million internally displaced people as a direct result of climate change, and this would continue to accelerate post 2050 as more parts of these countries become unable to support their population due to a changing climate.



If we take immediate urgent action to reduce emissions and slow down climate change and invest in developing countries to help mitigate the effects of climate change, we could reduce this figure by 80%

Even in their best case scenario where emissions are reduced, we're still likely to see 50 million internally displaced people in these regions due to climate change.

The World Bank is highlighting a need for planning now, to allocate resources to help these countries engage in planned mitigation and migration strategies, and these are all essential if we want to avoid conflict and other serious social problems driven by people in desperate need and failed states, but alongside this, we also need urgent global action to reduce emissions and prevent the worst case warming scenarios from happening.

Why even post what the World Bank thinks? What about all the positives of climate changing? Why is it ALL negative?

Harry Palmr

dense wrote: »

The area is historically prone to it unfortunately.

Major damage occurred in 1953 and 2013.



A mixture of things make it vulnerable, including land levels lowering over time.

The post glacial tilt combined with higher seas and greater storm surges is going to give the southern half of England along the east coast a hard time.

Harry Palmr

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Why even post what the World Bank thinks? What about all the positives of climate changing? Why is it ALL negative?

Warming oceans mean rising water levels, it also means warmer air at low levels combining with cold air to create more volatile air flow, as the worlds population moves to the big coastal cities the economic cost of hurricane speed winds and associated surges will cost billions per storm and many lives and livilihoods. Even here where we thought we were probably the least likely place to suffer side effects it's starting to become clear a price will be paid. The once in a century event is now more likely to be once in ten or twenty years at best. Obviously there are many other angles to this line disrupted supply chains as areas of intensive food production in certain latidues suffer flooding or drought depending on location and hemisphere.

There is no upside to climatic change as it is chaotic in nature.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

There's just too much nonsense in this to even begin to respond to.

Everything you highlighted in that post is true.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Why even post what the World Bank thinks? What about all the positives of climate changing? Why is it ALL negative?

Its a relevant study about potential serious consequences of global warming and the human and economic costs it could bestow if we fail to act fast enough.

What do you think the positive effects of climate change are? And do you think that its prudent to conduct a global geo engineering project just on the chance that there might be some benefits to some people?

dense

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Why even post what the World Bank thinks?

The report finds that internal climate migration will likely rise through 2050 and then accelerate unless there are significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and robust development action.

Talk about a veiled threat.

Between the godfather of global warming's proposal for a new army to police world carbon stocks and usage to the World Bank's fear mongering about intensified border control it's sure to create lots of new opportunities.

dense

I see good old Monckton has them completely up in arms with his new research into climate sensitivity.

Conclusion: The anthropogenic global warming we can now expect will be small, slow, harmless, and even net-beneficial. It is only going to be about 1.2 K this century, or 1.2 K per CO2 doubling.

Worth a read, and to view the 500+ responses since it was posted a day or so ago at WUWT.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/19/global-warming-on-trial-and-the-elementary-error-of-physics-that-caused-the-global-warming-scare/

Gaoth Laidir

Harry Palmr wrote: »

Warming oceans mean rising water levels, it also means warmer air at low levels combining with cold air to create more volatile air flow...

No, as the alleged devastation is claimed to be concentrated in 3rd world countries in the tropics and subtropics, cold air doesn't come into it as these areas don't get baroclinic systems. So I'm not sure what you mean by more volatile airflow.

...as the worlds population moves to the big coastal cities the economic cost of hurricane speed winds and associated surges will cost billions per storm and many lives and livilihoods.

Hurricanes have always hit coastal cities, yet we've built and developed these cities in some of the worst possible places (New Orleans, Houston, New York, etc.). Don't be surprised when they get hit by disaster every now and again.

Even here where we thought we were probably the least likely place to suffer side effects it's starting to become clear a price will be paid. The once in a century event is now more likely to be once in ten or twenty years at best.

Which events are you referring to here?

Obviously there are many other angles to this line disrupted supply chains as areas of intensive food production in certain latidues suffer flooding or drought depending on location and hemisphere.

There is no upside to climatic change as it is chaotic in nature.

Again, why do you say it's ALL negative, taking into account the errors and hearsay in what you said above? Is NO AREA going to see any benefit? Why not? How is that possible? Where's the balance that nature has always found? Do you also subscribe to this end of civilisation nonsense that Akrasia says is possible?

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Again, why do you say it's ALL negative, taking into account the errors and hearsay in what you said above? Is NO AREA going to see any benefit? Why not? How is that possible? Where's the balance that nature has always found? Do you also subscribe to this end of civilisation nonsense that Akrasia says is possible?

Civillisation ending consequences are alarmingly possible.
One example of something that is possible, is water shortages in india/pakistan/tibet/china/Afghanistan causing the breakdown of the already fragile Indus waters treaty.

A third of the worlds population living in nuclear armed states, in an area where the water supply is under huge pressure already, and reliant on glaciers which are in decline and causing reduced flow on some rivers already.

Are you saying it is not possible that the increased water pressure caused by global warming could not possibly spark a conflict that could escalate into a nuclear war?

Global warming is a 'Threat Multiplier' according to the US military. If there is already a conflict brewing somewhere, throwing in resource shortages and population instability, drought or famine on top of the existing political conflict makes resolution more difficult and escalation more likely.

Coles

Akrasia wrote: »

Civillisation ending consequences are alarmingly possible.

Fully agree. Dozens of civilizations have come and gone and usually at the core of the collapse is an environmental change that triggers a chain reaction (economic collapse, migration, conflict). The collapse can be abrupt or gradual over generations.

Gaoth Laidir

Akrasia wrote: »

Civillisation ending consequences are alarmingly possible.
One example of something that is possible, is water shortages in india/pakistan/tibet/china/Afghanistan causing the breakdown of the already fragile Indus waters treaty.

A third of the worlds population living in nuclear armed states, in an area where the water supply is under huge pressure already, and reliant on glaciers which are in decline and causing reduced flow on some rivers already.

Are you saying it is not possible that the increased water pressure caused by global warming could not possibly spark a conflict that could escalate into a nuclear war?

Global warming is a 'Threat Multiplier' according to the US military. If there is already a conflict brewing somewhere, throwing in resource shortages and population instability, drought or famine on top of the existing political conflict makes resolution more difficult and escalation more likely.

T'is the stuff of movies, this. Alarmist twaddle.

Gaoth Laidir

Coles wrote: »

Fully agree. Dozens of civilizations have come and gone and usually at the core of the collapse is an environmental change that triggers a chain reaction (economic collapse, migration, conflict). The collapse can be abrupt or gradual over generations.

Such as?

dense

Akrasia wrote: »

The point I am making here is there is enormous risk attached to changing the global climate.

This is a point I have tried to raise before regarding whether any unintended consequences associated with deliberately attempting to manually control the climate to prevent change have been assessed.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

T'is the stuff of movies, this. Alarmist twaddle.

Oh, well seeing as you called it twaddle I guess you win the argument.

Here's what Scripps has to say about potentially catastrophic climate change

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/new-climate-risk-classification-created-account-potential-existential-threats

Akrasia

dense wrote: »

This is a point I have tried to raise before regarding whether any unintended consequences associated with deliberately attempting to manually control the climate to prevent change have been assessed.

Hmm, I hope there aren't any unintended consequences attached to not polluting the atmosphere and oceans.

There actually were some unintended consequences with cleaning up our emissions which resulted in 'global brightening' (or the reversal of global dimming caused by human particulate emissions), which resulted in an increase in global temperatures, but if anyone wants to argue that we should be deliberately pumping soot and sulfur into the air in order to cool the planet, they've got a lot of arguing to do to present their case

dense

Akrasia wrote: »

Hmm, I hope there aren't any unintended consequences attached to not polluting the atmosphere and oceans.

There actually were some unintended consequences with cleaning up our emissions which resulted in 'global brightening' (or the reversal of global dimming caused by human particulate emissions), which resulted in an increase in global temperatures, but if anyone wants to argue that we should be deliberately pumping soot and sulfur into the air in order to cool the planet, they've got a lot of arguing to do to present their case

Was that from one of the scientific studies attempting to explain the hiatus in global warming; research which looks a bit silly now that other members of the community of settled scientists dispute that there ever was a hiatus?

Fun and games on the research merry go round.

Heads I win, tails you lose.