World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineering-warns-report.html

by ph0rque • 13 years ago

62 134 13 years ago

CodeCube• 13 years ago

Looking forward to my house turning into beachfront property here in Orlando, FL!

pilom• 13 years ago

Sounds nice except for you wont have any water to drink because all of the freshwater aquifers in Florida will have been infiltrated by sea-water. And this estimate of 1 meter of rise is on the low end of the estimates I've seen. Hope you get exactly the amount of seawater rise you need and also can fund your own desalination plant.

jtheory3• 13 years ago

Eh, Florida has enough green lawns to water that they're making good progress salinizing their aquifers without any rising tide necessary.

300bps12• 13 years ago

It's no surprise that the AGW crowd is losing the war of public opinion. Take the last line of the article that details a part of the report:

The draft report says the available evidence now suggests that above a certain threshold of warming, the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years, which will result in 7 metres of global sea-level rise. It estimates that the threshold may lie between 1 °C and 4 °C of warming, but is not confident of this figure.

So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.

I am a scientifically literate person with a strong conservation and environmental bent. But when I read something like this even I roll my eyes. Because I want people to actually conserve, please take the following advice to the AGW crowd:

First, stop using the disaster du jour to say, "See!?! We can expect more of this from now on!" Because when you did this with Katrina and then we had 8 years of relatively quiet hurricane seasons you sound like a "sky is falling" fool. The fact that "An Inconvenient Truth" came out shortly after Katrina with a hurricane on the movie posters and box covers was ridiculous.

Second, stop making inaccurate predictions about what is going to happen. For example - for a while everyone was decrying that snow was a thing of the past because of global warming (example: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-j...) When we then had record snowfalls throughout many areas of the world, the same people changed their tune and said, "Exactly! Global Warming will actually bring more snow!" Enough of this nonsense.

Stop using things like carbon credits to live a ridiculously lavish lifestyle while telling everyone else to live simply.

Finally, stop trying to profit off of AGW. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environmen...

There are many people that you will never convince of the reality of AGW. But there are many more people that you are turning away from believing you because of the things above. Because I think finite resource conservation is the right thing to do, please stop hurting this cause.

leokun4• 13 years ago

You seem to have a severe emotional response to data reports about global warming. The thing to remember is that how that data is reported doesn't actually matter. Reserve your angst for actual errors. The dramatic flashy wrappers people use is to try and reach people who would otherwise be watching ice truck drivers on the "History Channel".

talmand17• 13 years ago

If the reporting of that data includes a one-sided interpretation of that data, including denouncing anyone who may question said interpretation, then how it is reported does indeed matter and is a big part of the problem described.

Almost everything associated with how climate change research is reported makes it reek of bad science and propaganda.

steveplace• 13 years ago

I think many of them are stuck with how they can get their message out.

The media won't give them any coverage unless they throw out some disaster quotes, but the public has become tired of the same disaster scenarios that have been possible since 1995.

anon138511• 13 years ago

there are many more people that you are turning away from believing you because of the things above

The 'things above' being two insignificant newspaper articles over the last 13 years? Get real. People reject AGW[1] because of a very well funded propaganda campaign that spreads disinformation and because the existence of AGW is incompatible with the conservative, capitalist political philosophies held by most people in the anglosphere. There are studies demonstrating the latter effect:

Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the “Science Comprehension Thesis” (SCT), which identifies defects in the public’s knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the “Identity-protective Cognition Thesis” (ICT) which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties that members of the public use to make sense of decision-relevant science. In our experiment, we presented subjects with a difficult problem that turned on their ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data. As expected, subjects highest in Numeracy — a measure of the ability and disposition to make use of quantitative information — did substantially better than less numerate ones when the data were presented as results from a study of a new skin-rash treatment. Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized — and even less accurate — when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among subjects highest in Numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

A few misguided newpaper articles that over excitedly exaggerated uncertain predictions didn't make any difference to anything. Neither did Al Gore's personal finances. People ranting about Al Gore were never going to be won over by scientific arguments, their position is based on emotion and politics, not logical reasoning.

[1] people in the aglosphere that is, it's a much less prevalent phenomenon elsewhere

guscost3• 13 years ago

Could it be that your position is influenced by emotion and politics, and you are projecting this attitude onto the other side?

dmarusic16• 13 years ago

Capitalism in the sense you're using it isn't exactly a 'political philosophy'. Manufacture and trade is how human beings organize themselves and interact. If you're not taking that into account as you tackle the problem of a heating planet, you're bound to run into a brick wall.

3pt14159• 13 years ago

The fact is that the current warming is well below projected temperatures. It could reverse in the next ten years and prove everyone right, but the problem with global warming (which I agree is happening) is that it doesn't give us a scientific playground where we can try different things out. It is more like economics than it is like material science.

jerf4• 13 years ago

People in general, perhaps. But for myself, my biggest problem with AGW is indeed the fact that its predictions have an ever-longer history of not coming true.

As a person interested in science, I consider this a fatal objection to any theory. AGW is not excepted. Anyone who has the mental gymnastic strength to talk themselves past this problem is merely demonstrating that they are not actually interested in science at this point, as the disparity between theory and fact is pretty clear at this point.

If "the public" are having problems with AGW for the wrong reasons, well, it's hardly the first time the correct conclusion has been reached for the wrong reasons.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I find this whole report to be rather uplifting. I think that getting off of carbon is going to be much harder than doing something about the carbon. The cost of going carbon-free will be huge. I'm willing to bet that for less money we can find a way to pull it out of the atmosphere. And if there's money to be made, someone will figure out how to recycle it out of the atmosphere.

300bps12• 13 years ago

The 'things above' being two insignificant newspaper articles over the last 13 years? Get real

Another piece of advice - stop verbally attacking people that are sympathetic to your cause.

guscost3• 13 years ago

In addition, it would be nice if these people (I'm looking at you, Popular Science) would stop pretending that the opposition is not qualified to challenge their doctrine.

This kind of behavior does not help the pursuit of scientific knowledge in any way.

talmand17• 13 years ago

But that seems to be how it works. I'm mostly sympathetic to the whole climate change thing but every time one of them talks down to me simply based on their assumptions about me, I get a tad upset about it. It just rubs me the wrong way.

Especially when they presume to tell me what my opinion on the matter is before I've even stated it.

scarmig3• 13 years ago

One side effect of anthropogenic global warming is exponential increases in straw and herring.

davidjohnstone2• 13 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you start out criticising the cautious language of uncertainty, and then criticise others for making specific predictions that turn out to be wrong?

I'm perfectly happy with that cautious sentence, as it is as true as it can be stated given today's knowledge (I assume; I haven't looked into it). It's not a very good headline, but reality has a habit of being complicated.

"Luckily", we have plenty of people who are more interested in saying simple things that everybody can understand, like "snow is a thing of the past". Unfortunately, exciting scientific headlines have a habit of being wrong…

znowi• 13 years ago

Exactly! Global Warming will actually bring more snow!

This is why they renamed it to Climate Change, which is a win situation in any outcome :)

jellicle4• 13 years ago

So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.

No, what they are saying is that in addition to all the other effects of global warming, melting of a particular chunk of ice will be absolutely irreversible past a particular cutoff point, but the cutoff point is difficult to determine with precision. We are interested in the cutoff point because it will drown billions (sic) of human beings, but any lack of precision about that doesn't mean that the rest of global warming is somehow a mirage.

Most likely we have already passed the cutoff point and melting of the Greenland ice sheet is irreversible.

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

300bps12• 13 years ago

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

You right, me stupid.

Does that make you feel better to de-intellectualize someone who gives suggestions? Keep attacking people sympathetic to the cause and see where that gets you.

idProQuo• 13 years ago

This is really off topic, sorry in advance.

Why did you use "(sic)"? I always thought it stood for "Spelling InCorrect", but lately I keep seeing people use it in other contexts.

gd13• 13 years ago

Can you explain the mechanism by which billions of people will drown? Displaced perhaps, but drown? I'm fascinated. Are they incapable of, say, walking inland a little bit?

awj2• 13 years ago

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

This is "effective" advocacy at its finest. Write an otherwise useful response, then sneak in a personal attack to ensure the other person will not bother listening to you or particularly thinking about what you said.

I will save all of us a bit of time by pointing out in advance the hypocrisy of statements like: "well, if they're going to get emotional instead of being reasonable, piss on them".

mseebach3• 13 years ago

because it will drown billions (sic) of human beings

That definitely fails my sniff-test, but I'm no scholar in the area, so could could please explain how the science do indeed tell us that? Of particular interest is the justification of the word "will", of course meaning definite and inevitable, not some theoretical worst case scenario. The usage of the word also implied that the substantial mitigation efforts surely expected to be undertaken by those at risk will be catastrophically inadequate. Also, the word "drown" strikes me as oddly specific. I always assumed that the most potent causes of death caused by global warming would be secondary, such as starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, severe civil unrest or even war etc.

sally8885• 13 years ago

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

What's with the insults?

mcv7• 13 years ago

So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.

What? In the quote you included, they do spell out the bad things: the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, resulting in 7 meters of global sea-level rise. What's unclear about that?

A bit more subtle is what that 1-4 degrees warming means. That's not how much they think the earth will get warmer, that's what they think the threshold for the complete melting of Greenland's ice sheet is. So if we manage to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees C, there's a good chance it won't melt completely, but if the threshold turns out to be on the low end of the range, it might still melt.

There's also nothing excessively alarmist about this. It's up-front about the 1000 year time scale.

Also, don't blame the scientists for what less-informed alarmists are shouting. Though I agree that it would be easier to inform people if there weren't a ton of people shouting nonsense.

300bps12• 13 years ago

What? In the quote you included, they do spell out the bad things: the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, resulting in 7 meters of global sea-level rise. What's unclear about that?

Well, it sure sounds bad. But to most people it will be an abstract concept - what does that mean? It's like saying, "dihydrogen monoxide is the principal ingredient in acid rain". Makes water sound scary, doesn't it?

So what does a 7 meter rise in water over 1,000 years mean? Like I said, it sounds scary but is that:

a) We'll lose 3 miles of coastal land scary

b) We'll be in Kevin Costner Water World scary

I don't know the answer to that. They should spell out what the actual impact will be, not make an abstract statement few people have a point of reference about.

specialist5• 13 years ago

...stop making inaccurate predictions about what is going to happen.

Really?

You link to an article specifically about snowfall in Britain and then dismiss it with the counter evidence of record snowfall else where.

You need to try harder.

...losing the war of public opinion.

FUD. Good job. Please. Continue.

300bps12• 13 years ago

Please. Continue.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9950516/Worst-Marc...

codex2• 13 years ago

Public opinion is ambivalent on AGW largely due to the efforts of a small group of individuals which spreads FUD for the benefit of powerful interests. In the past, these same hired guns attempted to sway public opinion on acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT. I recommend the book Merchants of Doubt [1], which documents this in exacting detail.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obs...

300bps12• 13 years ago

The ironic thing is that the only people spreading fear are AGW-theory proponents. If anything, climate change deniers are reducing fear, making your accusation they are spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt a ridiculously easy claim to falsify.

SeanDav2• 13 years ago

It is laughable that all this is based on imprecise models and simulations and not actual science. There is nothing provable with any of this or for that matter disprovable.

Alter the inputs and weighting in the models by merest fractions, or try take new factors into account and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, yet on the basis of this Billions, if not Trillions of dollars are being moved around and new laws are being made, among many other side effects.

Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?

It is just crazy.

IanDrake• 13 years ago

Yes, predictive modeling is easy when the you don't have to prove you're accurate.

They just keep building more models yielding new predictions to cover all the bases so, when the future does come, they can claim success and forget all the failures.

tfgg• 13 years ago

Scientists? People who study the physics of the system in question by building models, simulating them and comparing to data? I'm not sure what else you expect. I'll take them for big policy decisions any day over some blogger cherry picking data.

ttflee2• 13 years ago

Sounds like an economist's job, to me.

No offense to economists.

talmand17• 13 years ago

Seems to me that everyone involved is cherry picking the data to support their own interpretation. There's even been accusations of cherry picking of how the data is collected in the first place.

davidjohnstone2• 13 years ago

I have a feeling that "imprecise models and simulations" is exactly how actual science is done much of the time these days.

The trick is to answer those questions of what data is used and how things are weighted etc. well, and that's exactly what the scientists who work on these models do.

gd13• 13 years ago

Difference is, most models can be validated against reality. I might model a car crash impact in LS-DYNA, then I eventually crash the real thing and compare. Unless you have a spare Earth lying around and a few centuries, then climate modellers can't do that. Instead they have maybe 80 years of reliable temperature data at best (which is just one variable), on a planet 4 billion years old.

The radiative physics can tell us a lot about basic climate sensitivity, but modelling the feedbacks inherent in such a complex system must be near impossible. Saying that climate change is "simple radiative physics" is very misleading, it is a little bit like saying that if I kick a ball it will accelerate away from me and that is "basic Newtonian physics". Well yes, but I may be standing at the bottom of a steep valley, in which case the larger system exerts a negative feedback, and the ball rolls back to my feet.

sek• 13 years ago

Maybe what you say is true,

but it has the positive side effect that we prepare ourselves for Peak Oil what will happen anyway.

jtheory3• 13 years ago

Is all science required to be "provable" now, then? Most science doesn't really work on proof, unfortunately; it's levels of certainty, not stamping something "proven" and being done with it. It's building models of reality and testing their accuracy as far as possible.

Public policy decisions cannot be based on "proof". There is never going to be proof positive of what the climate will do in the next 100 years until we arrive at 2113, and even then there will be aspects of the picture that will be unclear; not everything is easily measurable, and not everything you might like to know will be measured.

Actual science covers more ground than schoolwork where you have one variable and everything else is controlled. Climate change is a global-scale issues with innumerable variables that can not be controlled.

That's not the same as saying we can know nothing about it, or that we must make no decisions about what we can figure out with some reasonable level of certainty.

Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?

Are you saying that because you don't know how to do this stuff, no one can make predictions with a reasonable margin of error?

SeanDav2• 13 years ago

> Is all science required to be "provable" now, then?

This is the whole basis of Science. It is required to be provable, or it is just someone's opinion, and my opinion might be different to yours.

Perhaps you should research the Spanish Inquisition and the many atrocities committed by various religions for further insight into why this matters.

EDIT: Strictly speaking Science must be falsifiable

bsullivan01• 13 years ago

the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years

Gee, we're making 1000 predictions right now? How are those predictions made 10-30 years ago faring?

talmand17• 13 years ago

And who's to say that ice would not have disappeared naturally over the next 1000 years if humans didn't exist at all?

jsdalton• 13 years ago

I wish geoengineering played a much larger role in the conversations around global warming.

It seems we're never going to wean ourselves off of petroleum, and most efforts to meaningfully curtail its use are politically untenable (outside of Europe that is).

I think if people who believe in global warming are serious about solving the problem and not just hand waving about driving less and turning off our lights, then they'd start devoting some serious attention to geoengineering.

(Note I'm not poking at a straw man in the paragraph above. Check out the NRDC page on global warming solutions [http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/solutions/]. I see a lot about restricting pollution and remaking our lifestyles, but NOTHING at all about geoengineering.)

ttflee2• 13 years ago

But in the longer term, isn't it the global cooling rather than the global warming that is more disastrous to human beings and the eco-system?

MrZongle2• 13 years ago

I think this is an excellent question.

There's been a lot of panic over the rise of sea levels and a warmer climate, but why exactly is this a world-ending disaster? Yes, the coastlines may change and yes, people will be displaced.

Such has been the case for all of recorded history, and far before. Humans can adapt: they have, and they will again.

I find the idea of geoengineering far more terrifying than global warming. The community that can't get their models to explain the last few years of observations now wants to throw a massive new wrench into the works? Madness.

csense• 13 years ago

Exactly. If the sea levels rise ten meters overnight, that would be an enormous catastrophe with unfathomable loss of life.

If the sea levels rise ten meters over a couple decades, people will get the heck out when the water's at their ankles, instead of patiently waiting a few years until it's over their heads.

Or figure out a local civil engineering solution like diverting the water with levees and dams, that's at worst a local disaster if it doesn't work out.

dmead• 13 years ago

in 3001: a space oddessy the book talks about how humanity had to build huge mirrors to reflect heat back into space. my body is ready

World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report

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