Global warming must stay below 2C or world faces ruin, scientists declare

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6380709.ece

From The Times
May 28, 2009

Global warming must stay below 2C or world faces ruin, scientists declare

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/sjp_memorandum_290509.pdf">Read the memorandum in full (PDF)

World carbon emissions must start to decline in only six years if humanity is to stand a chance of preventing dangerous global warming, a group of 20 Nobel prize-winning scientists, economists and writers declared today.

The United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December must agree to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 to stop temperatures from increasing by more than 2C (3.6F), the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded.

While even a 2C temperature rise will have adverse consequences, a bigger increase would create “unmanageable climate risks”, according to the St James’s Palace memorandum, signed today by 20 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economics, peace and literature.

The temperature target “can only be achieved with a peak of global emissions of all greenhouse gases by 2015”, the document said. If emissions continue to rise after that date, the required cuts would become unachievable. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a convenor of the symposium, likened the urgency for action on climate change to the threat of thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War.

…

(Video at link.)

[phantom power]

1. That's unfortunate news, considering...

the recent assessment that "we can forget about the 2C."

[villager]

2. and how on earth -- so to speak -- are we going to come anywhere near keeping under a 2C rise?

n/t

[Birthmark]

3. We're not. eom

[kestrel91316]

10. Well, eventually temps will drop back down. After we are all dead and gone.

[Dover]

4. So everywhere in the world will feel like Texas in August?

I think folks should come visit Texas in mid-August just to begin to acclimate to the change.
And don't forget your 10 gallon hat so you can take your shade with ya, and your book on 1001 Texas colloquialisms for expressing your discomfort:

Such as:

Texas has four seasons: Almost Summer, Summer, Still Summer, and Christmas.
It's hotter than a goat's behind in a pepper patch.
Texas is hotter than a fur coat in Marfa. (You have to be familiar with Marfa, Tx. for that one).

[phantom power]

5. The parts that are still habitable will feel like Texas.

[Delphinus]

9. Been to Arizona in July.

Went out for a walk and fried. Just walking - felt like going through fire.

[hatrack]

6. Not to worry! I'm sure there's an industry-friendly win-win solution out there RIGHT NOW!

And we'll all get to keep our plasma TVs and fly to Cancun each March for spring break . . .

:eyes:

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. That's great news!

'cause I've never been to Cancun!

What kind of time frame are we talkin' about here?

[hatrack]

8. I think the "six years" timeline is what stuck in my mind . . .

Beyond that, I hadn't been thinking much past next quarter's GDP numbers, so in that sense I'm very much in the mainstream. :sarcasm:

[JohnWxy]

11. RECOMMENDED!!

" World carbon emissions must start to decline in only six years if humanity is to stand a chance of preventing dangerous global warming, a group of 20 Nobel prize-winning scientists."


We don't have 15 to 20 years to wait for hybrids to start to have an appreciable impact (just considering the transportation sector). We can reduce CO2 emissions in transportation sector by dramatically increasing ethanol production from all available feedstocks (e.g. sugar from Mexico). Shoot for ethanol meeting 20% - 25% of fuel supply in 10 years. Production of the Ford Ecoboost engine (30% mpg improvement @ $600 - $1,000 a copy will realize much more rapid adoption by buyers) will produce a much quicker reduction of gasoline consumption and CO2 emissions until hybrids can add a bigger impact in approximately 20 - 30 years from now. REquire new ethanol plants to be built using Closed Loop or Combined Heat and Power - magnify CO2 redcutctions of ethanol (closed Loop plants would have a negative carbon footprint).

We should be mobilizing our resources and energies to build out wind farms and any needed power lines as fast as possible.

Start retrofitting older and building new residential and commercial structures with CO2 emissions reductions in mind. Incentivise purchase of highly efficient (Gold Star) appliances.

Incentivise the use Combinded Heat and Power design in all new industrial power installations.

OF course, this Republican Dystopia we are now in isn't helping. Money for new investments in new technologies isn't nearly as available and the cost to borrow is up as banks have to shore up their shakey balance sheets after several years of gambling with Credit Default Swaps almost destroyed the financial services industry (It would have wiped out the Financial Services Sector without Government intervention - i.e. John and Jane Taxpayer.)


Ah, the delights of Deregulation just keep on crashing down on us.


on Edit:

Frankly, I don't think we are going to get serious about this soon enough to make a difference. Some of these steps (i.e. the first one) run counter to some people's religion. It might be recognized that we need to do a lot more and sooner than later - maybe in 7 to 10 years. But, I think by then it will be too late.

[guardian]

12. Then I guess it's a good thing that the the world is cooling.

Link: http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM

World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Well, quite.

That 2008 was the tenth hottest year on record means the glaciers will be rolling over Florida any day now. And as any Aussie farmer will tell you¹, plants just love a nice warm climate shift.

This is Parkes, NSW:
Average temp 63F.



And look at all those fucking crops! It's Awesome!
_______

¹ Assuming the poor bastard hasn't just blown his brains out in the back paddock because his animals are all dead, that is.

[guardian]

14. Sounds like "incident based thinking" to me. n/t

[guardian]

15. No change since 1855

How is the Australian heat wave/drought a sign of global warming? According to many sources (see one below) this is worst since either 1908 or 1855. Which means Australia had a heat wave of equal or higher magnitude over a hundred years ago! All you global warming zealots see signs of global warming in everything from snow cones to pencil lead to a summer rain storm.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/4414203/Southern-Australia-endures-worst-heatwave-for-150-years.html

[Dead_Parrot]

16. lol

Actually, I was trying to point out that plants don't automatically do better in warmer conditions if there's no fucking rain, but thanks for drawing our attention to the fact you can't tell the difference between three days in Melborne and 15 years of drought across an entire continent.

[Ghonadz]

18. frequency of incidents is key

The assertion by 'guardian' that because there were big bushfires in Australia's past, there is no significance to the recent devastating bushfires and ongoing drought. The truth is, there have always been extreme weather events but they occurred rarely. What is happening now is that, due to the effects of global warming, these kind of events are happening more frequently. Here's a good article referencing actual scientific studies on this subject, not the kind of denier blog nonsense about the Earth cooling that was quoted by 'guardian'. Here's an excerpt from the article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/08/global-warming-weather-science

"Professor Mark Adams, from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, said the extreme weather conditions that led to the bushfires are likely to occur more often.

"The weather and climatic conditions recently don't augur well for the future. Bushfires are an important and going to be ever-present part of the landscape," he said.

Australia is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which has stretched for more than seven years in some areas and has forced restrictions on water use in the country's big cities.

A government-commissioned report on climate change last year warned that exceptionally hot years, which used to occur once every 22 years, would occur every one or two years, virtually making drought a permanent part of the Australian environment."

[arenean]

20. Politics.....

Hmm...as I used to work at the Hadley Centre, it's probably best for me to quote what the Chief Scientist here at the Met Office (where the Hadley Centre is based) has to say.....


“Scientific evidence has been selectively chosen to support a cause. In the 1990s, global temperatures increased more quickly than in earlier decades, leading to claims that global warming had accelerated. In the past 10 years the temperature rise has slowed, leading to opposing claims. Again, neither claim is true, since natural variations always occur on this timescale. For example, 1998 was a record-breaking warm year as long-term man-made warming combined with a naturally occurring strong El Niño. In contrast, 2008 was slightly cooler than previous years partly because of a La Niña. Despite this, it was still the 10th warmest on record.

“The most recent example of this sequence of claim and counter-claim focused on the Greenland ice sheet. The melting of ice around south-east Greenland accelerated in the early part of this decade, leading to reports that scientists had underestimated the speed of warming in this region. Recent measurements, reported in Science magazine last week, show that the speed-up has stopped across the region. This has been picked up on the climate sceptics’ websites. Again, natural variability has been ignored in order to support a particular point of view, with climate change advocates leaping on the acceleration to further their cause and the climate change sceptics now using the slowing down to their own benefit. Neither group is right and all that is achieved is greater confusion among the public. What is true is that there will always be natural variability in the amount of ice around Greenland and that as our climate continues to warm, the long-term reduction in the ice sheet is inevitable.

“For climate scientists, having to continually rein in extraordinary claims that the latest extreme is all due to climate change is, at best, hugely frustrating and, at worst, enormously distracting. Overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening. Both undermine the basic facts that the implications of climate change are profound and will be severe if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically and swiftly over the coming decades.

“When climate scientists like me explain to people what we do for a living we are increasingly asked whether we “believe in climate change”. Quite simply it is not a matter of belief. Our concerns about climate change arise from the scientific evidence that humanity’s activities are leading to changes in our climate. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.”

[Delphinus]

24. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.

That should say it all and put the arguing to rest.

[excess_3]

17. who decided 2C was the magic number?

I don't remember voting for such a person

[Ghonadz]

19. you don't get to vote

"who decided 2C was the magic number?"

Seems to be an expert estimate by the top climate scientists using the best available data.

[hatrack]

21. And I never even got so much as push-polled on gravitation & the weak force . . .

Sucks, doesn't it?

:eyes:

[excess_3]

22. people who study the weak nuclear force ...

people who study the weak nuclear force
do not seem to be (at least openly)
lobbying to take cars and electricty
away from the poor,
and/or
trying to peddle their
carbon ration stamps

[Nihil]

23. Oh FFS ...

> lobbying to take cars and electricty away from the poor

Razzleberry, excess_3 or whoever you come back as next time,
can you *please* quit with the complete bullshit that you spam
whenever your fingers get near someone's keyboard?

The only sensible thing you seem to post these days is your
quite valid rant about the lack of tax on international air
fuel.

NOBODY (not even the GOP) happens to be "lobbying to take cars
and electricty (sic) away from the poor".

:banghead:

[NickB79]

26. Who the hell are you to talk about protecting the poor?

You stated in a previous discussion about the ethanol bust, and I quote: "The US needs to stop exporting corn".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x198115

Such an act would lead to the starvation of MILLIONS of poor people in less developed nations and likely even trigger government collapses and civil wars there.

You don't give a fuck about poor people, so drop the act.

[Ginny from the Block]

25. It's time to quit ignoring the scientists!

I'm getting nervous about this upcoming Copenhagen Conference the end of the year, because any UN treaty will only be as strong as the law the US passes this year. With the Cap & Trade legislation getting totally watered down by lobbyists(see www.1sky.org), we've got an uphill battle to wake up Congress.