Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

[4588686]

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If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
[b]The First Number: 2° Celsius[/b][/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
[size=6]I[/size]f the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."[/size][/font][/color][color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]
Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.[/size][/font][/color]


[color=#000000][font=georgia][size=3]Read more: [url="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz29I9krfm5"]http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz29I9krfm5[/url][/size][/font][/color]

[dominicansoul]

[img]http://extraordinaryintelligence.com/files/2011/05/time-magazine-ice-age-global-warming.gif[/img]


scientists and journalists... I never know what to believe on this issue anymore....

[OnlySunshine]

[quote name='dominicansoul' timestamp='1350238451' post='2493319']
[img]http://extraordinaryintelligence.com/files/2011/05/time-magazine-ice-age-global-warming.gif[/img]


scientists and journalists... I never know what to believe on this issue anymore....
[/quote]

Amen! I don't pay much attention to this global warming thing. I think it's a bunch of hooey. I'm all for good stewardship of the earth but worrying about the end times is something I'll leave up to God.

[vee]

it was a short ice age ds, now for five years of warming

[OnlySunshine]

[quote name='vee8' timestamp='1350238716' post='2493323']
it was a short ice age ds, now for five years of warming
[/quote]

[img]http://www.picgifs.com/disney-graphics/disney-graphics/ice-age/disney-graphics-ice-age-098001.jpg[/img]

[Nihil Obstat]

I agree with Laudate_Dominum.

[southern california guy]

As a gardener I'm looking forward to global warming! I want to grow a mangosteen fruit tree!!!

[img]http://www.palmssc.org/2006Sept/06MarRV014bMd.jpg[/img]

[Groo the Wanderer]

try to see the bright side. all the urban blight would be wiped out and washed out to sea...SanFran, LA, Hollywood, NYC, Amsterdam. hellholes of sin anyway.

we could colonize antarctica and have pet penguins! how cool!

[4588686]

[quote name='dominicansoul' timestamp='1350238451' post='2493319']
[img]http://extraordinaryintelligence.com/files/2011/05/time-magazine-ice-age-global-warming.gif[/img]


scientists and journalists... I never know what to believe on this issue anymore....
[/quote]


I don't think that you have any interest in the truth. But if you are interested in helping evade enormous suffering being visited upon millions and millions of people, then you may want to read about the press lead global cooling hype which is quite different from the science driven concern about global warming

[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling[/url]

[quote name='Groo the Wanderer' timestamp='1350245641' post='2493352']
try to see the bright side. all the urban blight would be wiped out and washed out to sea...SanFran, LA, Hollywood, NYC, Amsterdam. hellholes of sin anyway.

we could colonize antarctica and have pet penguins! how cool!
[/quote]


Do you have children?

[4588686]

[quote name='MaterMisericordiae' timestamp='1350238640' post='2493321']

Amen! I don't pay much attention to this global warming thing. I think it's a bunch of hooey. I'm all for good stewardship of the earth but worrying about the end times is something I'll leave up to God.
[/quote]


This isn't the end times. If you leave this up to God then you are being an irresponsible person. Millions upon millions of people are going to seriously suffer more than necessary. The fact that you can take such a flippant attitude towards this, which is going to visit the worst suffering on the poor and disenfranchised, really speaks ill of your mindset. Jesus commanded you to help the poor. Not piss all over them while joking about how God can handle the armagedon all on his own.

[4588686]

[quote name='southern california guy' timestamp='1350244787' post='2493347']
As a gardener I'm looking forward to global warming! I want to grow a mangosteen fruit tree!!!

[img]http://www.palmssc.org/2006Sept/06MarRV014bMd.jpg[/img]
[/quote]


Sure. 20 million Bangladeshies may be displaced by this, with their rice fields wiped out, but you get to have a mango tree. Nothing narcissistic about that.

[Vincent Vega]

This thread is full of examples as to why many non-religious people consider religious individuals to be closed-minded, anti-scientific, and/or generally stupid.

[Groo the Wanderer]

it also has many examples of iriots drinking the koolaid of the liberal media, having no sense of humor, and whackjobs that think wiki is a magisterial document.

is the earth warming? yes. anything we can do about it? no. natural cyclic phenomena? yep. worry about it? nope

so even if the waters do rise, it won;t be overnight. good thing God gave people legs..so they can walk away from the waterline...derp.


now...bring on the llamas!

disclaimer: anyone else making tongue-in-cheek jokes beware...serious lack of funny bones going on...

Edited October 14, 2012 by Groo the Wanderer

[Groo the Wanderer]

[quote name='Hasan' timestamp='1350253019' post='2493388']


I don't think that you have any interest in the truth. But if you are interested in helping evade enormous suffering being visited upon millions and millions of people, then you may want to read about the press lead global cooling hype which is quite different from the science driven concern about global warming

[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling"]http://en.wikipedia..../Global_cooling[/url]




Do you have children?
[/quote]


wiki again? dude - move out of your parents' basement. that's like reading the back of a froot loops box for a geometry lesson.

yes i have a daughter. good thing i taught her to swim, huh? LORF!!!

[Nihil Obstat]

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At the end of the day, anthropogenic global warming is a scientific question that must be settled by scientists. That means tests, hard data, and peer reviews. No talking heads, liberal or conservative, have either the scientific knowledge and training, or the in-depth understanding of the actual questions to have even the smallest idea what they are talking about.

After all, anyone with more than a quarter of a brain can see how appalling the media is at reporting on anything vaguely science related. They practically just make up their entire articles, based on the first and last sentence of the abstract. It is pathetic.

I certainly am not equipped to make sweeping statements on the issue. So rather than asking Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh to do my thinking for me, I would rather know what the [i]actual data[/i] and [i]actual studies[/i] support.[/background][/size][/font][/color]