Beach Front Property
665 ViewsClimate Progress has an article on just how bad things are going to get, “Hell and High Water“. I suggest a careful reading of this article.
This fully supports my own position stated here, Beyond The Point of No Return conclusion, although I don’t think they’ve dared let the proverbial cat out of the bag yet like I have.
Their data points:
- Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 15°F over much of the United States
- Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
- Widespread desertification — as much as one-third of the land
- Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
- Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
- More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf
“Irreversible impacts” for at least a 1000 years. This is a gross understatement I’m afraid.
Once our aerosols in the atmosphere decline (which are currently slowing down the effects of climate change), the planet is going to heat up very, very rapidly which will cause massively accelerated climate change effects, including the dreaded negative feed-back loops that will push the planet beyond all hope of recovery (in terms of human existence).
It’s hard to assess what things like “30% soil moisture” loss really mean if you don’t understand the significance of these terms. Or “severe hurricanes” if you’ve never survived one. We can’t even get our mind around “100 million climate refugees from rising sea levels” or “calcification stops” in the world’s oceans.
The problem when we read about these things is that we cannot seem to appreciate what they signify. Essentially, these data points are all very, very deadly for the entire planet. Here are a few of the highlights:
What is less well understood is that even a very strong mitigation effort that kept carbon emissions this century to 11 GtC a year on average would still probably take us to 1000 ppm
The scientific community has spent little time modeling the impacts of a tripling (~830 ppm) or quadrupling (~1100 ppm) carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels. In part, I think, that’s because they never believed humanity would be so stupid as to ignore the warnings and simply continue on its self-destructive path. In part, they lowballed the difficult-to-model amplifying feedbacks in the carbon cycle.
So I pieced together those impacts from available studies and from discussions with leading climate scientists for my book, Hell and High Water. But now as climate scientists have sobered up to their painful role as modern-day Cassandra’s, the scientific literature on what we face is much richer. Let me review it here.
TEMPERATURE
Two of the best recent analyses of what we are headed towards can be found here:
- M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C
- Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path
As Dr. Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice for the Met Office’s Hadley Centre explains on their website (here):
Contrast that with a world where no action is taken to curb global warming. Then, temperatures are likely to rise by 5.5 °C and could rise as high as 7 °C above pre-industrial values by the end of the century.
That likely rise corresponds to roughly 10°F globally and typically 50% higher than that over inland mid-latitudes (i.e. much of this country) — or 15°F.
Based on two studies in the last few years:
By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year. Much of Arizona would be subjected to temperatures of 105°F or more for 98 days out of the year–14 full weeks.
Yet that conclusion is based on studies of only 700 ppm and 850 ppm, so it could get much hotter than that.
So please read the article link for yourself.
I think that these estimates are still off in their scope and severity and particularly, in their time-frames and planetary-wide impacts. This is because some effects are still not being considered or well-understood. This isn’t anybody’s fault, much of the scientific world is scrambling right now to catch up. But the “scientific reticence” that I’ve blogged about before actually prevents them from raising the alarm too loudly. Here is a former quote of my own on this issue:
There is still (of course) a strange reticence to “tell it like it is” within the scientific community and how incredibly fast and rapid changes are occurring on our planet.
Every year, we get new reports and analysis, and every year, they move their projections up by several decades, trying to catch up to what is now happening and being recorded. I think the tendency to under emphasize the danger we are in is a very bad idea, but markets need to be protected too (if you’re a capitalist).
There are those leading scientists in the world that would agree with me. We’re not going far enough, fast enough or drastically enough to stave off the looming disaster. The reality here is I agree with them, they are the experts, not me. I have taken the information they have shared and mixed it with all the other sources of news and information gleaned from around the world. I wish I had more time to do an even better job of it, because a lot of pieces still remain missing.
I do however, do not believe that there is any solution to climate change, other then simply stopping all of our industrial activity on a global scale. Any technology that we could possibly develop would simply permit humans to induce even more long-term damage. In other words, it would most certainly not save us at all, it would only make the crash that much worse because we would not stop our polluting ways. We would have only enabled ourselves to do it longer and with more people.
This is the problem with many technologies we are embracing today. Agriculture was supposed to “feed the world”, but it’s not. It’s destroying the land and the habitat with monoculture deserts and the people are still hungry. Computers and cell phones and all forms of electronic communication were suppose to introduce the ‘paperless office’ and save the environment and our forests, but we’re cutting down more trees for paper then ever. And we’re assaulting our bodies with daily doses of radiation effects that we only barely seem to understand.
Humans seem to take whatever technological marvels they develop and exploit them until their worst effects are realized (and widespread). We still stupidly think that these things are going to lessen our workload and even save our lives, hardly realizing that they wind up being the devices that lead to our destruction.
As far as I know, nobody has ever published an assessment of human invention and engineering and it’s overall negative effects, but it’s not that hard to just pick one of these miracle technologies and uncover the effects we now have to live with. Our entire society is saturated with technology that chains us all down, but usually in ways which are no longer obvious to our now-dulled minds.
In any case, I drifted off from the main topic above. Sorry about that. I guess what I’m trying to say is we badly need a “reset” button pushed on our entire civilization and it looks like we’re going to get it.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Gaia wrathfully expunges all would-be usurpers; every plague ‘dies itself out’
but there’s always Hopium - don’t y’know -
and the blessed ever afterlife, after all!
Hell! Me good guy, God luvs me.
His will be done on Earth …
(oh shit) Jesusfuckingchrist!!!
So, carry on folks, Nuttin to see here.
Mooooove along and ‘bleat sheeple bleat’
(louder, I can’t hearrrrrrrr you)
uh … whatever
Please do enjoy your brief spa vacation in the sheering shed as prelude to the slaughter house climax and your inevitable reprocessing through the food-chain
for non-sheeple
Got coffin?
(want burial? start digging)
March 24th, 2009 at 5:49 am
Admin, I don’t want to piss you off by asking a bonehead question. But, what do you think is going on with sites like Rense that post articles like this one: http://www. worldnetdaily. com / index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=92557
that says that global warming is just a hoax that the fat cats want so they can charge texes, ect. Here’s a scientist or several of them that come up with findings that seem to be just the opposite. It makes me crazy.
(fix the link above if you want to read this, I despise WND and won’t send them any traffic - Admin)
March 24th, 2009 at 9:34 am
This article in question is actually a sales pitch, found just a few lines down in the article.
You do need to be careful where you get your information from, especially these days. I harp on the MSM (main stream media), but rags like WND are just as bad. Basically, their sellouts to fit their biased agendas while ignoring or denying the real truth.
If you notice, you won’t find any real science or studies posted — that’s a dead giveaway that agendas are being followed.
The alleged ‘data points’ raised, such as a reversal of warming have been soundly debunked. Most of these so-called “studies” are not, they’re akin to picking a single tree out of an entire forest and claiming that “we have found the forest”. In other words, bullshit.
Don Easterbrook is a geology professor, not a climatologist. The two are not unrelated, however the data they use and how it it manipulated is often quite questionable.
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever among the world’s leading scientist that the planet has entered into a global warming trend. Not all areas of the globe will warm up, some will experience the reverse with cooling and increased precipitation as weather patterns change.
WND is basically an online rag ‘magazine’, not worthy of reading for the intelligent and informed (imo). I’m not making an ad hominem argument here either, some things are simply true. The crap they post is pablum for brainless morons.
The ‘conspiracy’ crap I’ve seen of using global warming to help ‘take over the world’ and increase tighter regulations on the world’s citizens is absolute crap. Think about it. What a unbelievably stupid way to try to force tighter governance on the world’s citizens.
This theory is baseless in reality. The world’s governments and leading corporations are scrambling very hard to figure out how to stay in business because of the real effects of global warming. Since they are already in charge and own the planet, why would they hurt themselves by promoting this control conspiracy theory?
Instead, what they are really doing is denying the global warming science with a vengeance. This was official policy under the Bush Administration.
And it is still very much a part of corporate policy. These assholes are quite willing to destroy the entire planet into a smoking ruin as long as they can make a buck today. They care not for what happens in 50 or 100 years, all their fat-cat executives will be dead by then.
WND and other raglines like this are simply too stupid to connect the dots and read the science.
Don’t get me started on WND and others like them, I’m convinced that sites like this are doing more harm then good.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Here’s a quote:
“Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.
This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?” A Self Fulfilling Prophecy
Definitely worth reading. My dire predictions are actually reflected in this article too –
“And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above three degrees of warming, the world’s vegetation will become “a net source of carbon”(17). This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to five or six: the end - for humans - of just about everything.”
“The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation.”
Monbiot argues that mitigation is our only logical option, and on this point, I do disagree. We won’t be able to pull this off either. For every effort at mitigation, we will inexorably be pumping in more carbon by the very act. And mitigations efforts are all “unknowns”, we do not even know if they would work.
Changing our civilization would do the trick, and this is not “surrender” at all, but the best form of adaption we could possibly make. But nobody wants to do this, they want to keep up the “business as usual” as long as possible, even if this really means the extinction of the human race. Which is exactly what this means. Basically, these people who advocate this are guilty of global genocide.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Cryptogon fully buys into the “climate change is a big control conspiracy” claptrap also, but then again that is Cryptogon’s stock in trade….conspiracies. So be cautious in what you see over there.
March 28th, 2009 at 11:26 am
TMK, the general consensus among climatologists is for a 4 to 8C mean increase within the ‘normally’ expected lifetime of those born (alive) today. Do the math people. Current global mean temp is generally agreed to be approx. 15C. Increasing mean temp by ‘just’ 6C is thermal catastrophe for all non-thermophile life forms on Earth - not ‘just’ us bipeds but ‘everything’. Converted to degrees F, a ‘typical’ 70F day becomes 98F, and a 90F day becomes 126F, and a 100F day becomes 140F. ETC. Bye bye bozos.