+2 degree C by 2030, studies say

[n2doc]

By Nina ChestneyPosted 2011/10/23 at 1:03 pm EDT

LONDON, Oct. 23, 2011 (Reuters) — Global temperature rise could exceed "safe" levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, two research papers published in the journal Nature warned.

"Certain levels of climate change are very likely within the lifetimes of many people living now ... unless emissions of greenhouse gases are substantially reduced in the coming decades," said a study on Sunday by academics at the English universities of Reading and Oxford, the UK's Met Office Hadley Center and the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

"Large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 -- a timescale that is not so distant," the paper said.

Two years ago, industrialized nations set a 2 degree Celsius warming as the maximum limit to avoid dangerous climate changes including more floods, droughts and rising seas, while some experts said a 1.5 degree limit would be safer.

more
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre79m2l7-us-warming/

[XemaSab]

1. Yeah, as if we're "choosing" to "let" it go to 2C

when we could just as easily "choose" to "let" it go to 1.5C. :eyes:

[hatrack]

2. Tool Monkeys! FUCK YEAH!!!!!!!!

:woohoo:

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. Well, the only way to prevent warming of 2°C was to use tools

We chose not to.

[Gregorian]

3. Ride a bike. Save the planet.

:)

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. Well… at least ride a bike…

It won’t save the planet, but it might help a little.

[Nederland]

4. Not going to happen

2 degree Celsius warming in less than 20 years? Not going to happen. I just have to wonder if five years from now when it is obvious that they were wrong if people will remember what these idiots were saying. Probably not...

[Viking12]

5. It's not 2 degrees in 20 years. It's 2 degrees above pre-anthropogenic climate.

But you knew that, right? ...and you have the nerve to call others idiots.

[The Croquist]

7. When did we have a pre-anthropogenic climate?

It would be nice to have a set starting date so we can measure from there.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. OK, let’s use August 1, 1492 as a starting date

Sure, we’d already been affecting the climate by then, but not nearly as dramatically.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335168/title/Columbus_arrival_linked_to_carbon_dioxide_drop

Columbus' arrival linked to carbon dioxide drop

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell
November 5th, 2011; Vol.180 #10 (p. 12)

MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped augment Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle's team has argued.

…

[The Croquist]

12. Fair enough. What was the temperate of the earth on August 1, 1492?

Now that we've got a starting point we can work with it. What was/will be the comparative global temperatures in 1492 versus 1592, 1692, 1792, 1892, 1992 and 2092?

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. How precise a figure will you accept?

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=2

FIGURE S-1 Smoothed reconstructions of large-scale (Northern Hemisphere mean or global mean) surface temperature variations from six different research teams are shown along with the instrumental record of global mean surface temperature. Each curve portrays a somewhat different history of temperature variations and is subject to a somewhat different set of uncertainties that generally increase going backward in time (as indicated by the gray shading). This set of reconstructions conveys a qualitatively consistent picture of temperature changes over the last 1,100 years and especially over the last 400. See http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=17#p200108c09960017001">Figure O-5 for details about each curve.

After considering all of the available evidence, including the curves shown in http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=2#p200108c09960002001">Figure S-1, the committee has reached the following conclusions:

• The instrumentally measured warming of about 0.6°C during the 20th century is also reflected in borehole temperature measurements, the retreat of glaciers, and other observational evidence, and can be simulated with climate models.
• Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions yield a generally consistent picture of temperature trends during the preceding millennium, including relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the “Medieval Warm Period”) and a relatively cold period (or “Little Ice Age”) centered around 1700. The existence of a Little Ice Age from roughly 1500 to 1850 is supported by a wide variety of evidence including ice cores, tree rings, borehole temperatures, glacier length records, and historical documents. Evidence for regional warmth during medieval times can be found in a diverse but more limited set of records including ice cores, tree rings, marine sediments, and historical sources from Europe and Asia, but the exact timing and duration of warm periods may have varied from region to region, and the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain.
• It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
• Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.
• Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.

…

Despite these limitations, the committee finds that efforts to reconstruct temperature histories for broad geographic regions using multiproxy methods are an important contribution to climate research and that these large-scale surface temperature reconstructions contain meaningful climatic signals. The individual proxy series used to create these reconstructions generally exhibit strong correlations with local environmental conditions, and in most cases there is a physical, chemical, or physiological reason why the proxy reflects local temperature variations. Our confidence in the results of these reconstructions becomes stronger when multiple independent lines of evidence point to the same general result, as in the case of the Little Ice Age cooling and the 20th century warming.

…

[The Croquist]

15. 0.1 degrees C.

We're talking about 0.1 degrees changes here. I think that's reasonable.

[Nederland]

16. Yes I knew that...

...and it' still not going to happen.

[NickB79]

6. We just added 1 degree in the past 50 yr, so we're halfway there

Per the UC-Berkeley/Muller study.

And CO2 concentrations are still increasing.

[The Croquist]

14. BEST

Not according to GISS if you believe pre satellite data which I don't. According to GISS the thirties were hotter then the sixties. Neither were 1 degree C. above todays level.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Millions will be ‘trapped’ in areas facing environmental risks

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/111020c.html

Millions will be ‘trapped’ in areas facing environmental risks

20 Oct 11

Major challenges associated with migration and environmental change 'have been underestimated', according to a major new report. The report by Foresight is based on advice from a six-strong team of experts, including Professor David Thomas and Professor Stefan Dercon from Oxford University.

The 'Migration and Global Environmental Change' project is published by the Foresight project (for the Government Office for Science). It concludes that by focusing solely on those that might leave vulnerable areas, we risk neglecting those that will be 'trapped' and those that will actually move towards danger.

It also shows that migration can have a transformative role in helping communities adapt to hazardous conditions, which it describes as a 'critical finding for policy makers' working to avert costly humanitarian disasters in the future.

The report examines how profound changes in environmental conditions such as flooding, drought and rising sea levels will influence and interact with patterns of global human migration over the next 50 years. These patterns of human movement, 75 per cent of which are internal, will present major challenges as well as potential opportunities for communities and policy makers at both a national and international level.

…