From a pure science reporting point of view the news article screams "the claims in this news article are an outlier result that isn't actually likely to be true". The lack of peer review, the claims that things are actually 10 times worse than the consensus, the focus on the fact that it's a famous scientist all tend to correlate with really bad articles, and the article barely even mentions any of the actual science done here. (and the part it does mention the science claims that the article doesn't even say it will happen in the next century)
The data we have has been evolving very rapidly over the last few years, but in general, it would appear to support these conclusions. If they'd thrown in a guesstimate on possible massive arctic permafrost/clathrate methane leaks, it'd make this estimate look conservative. Greenland, West and likely East Antarctica are all far more vulnerable to rapid melt than we had imagined, and those different findings have not to my knowledge so far been combined and used to update global models until now.
The paper is written by some of the real heavy-hitters of climate science, so I would take it in some sense as almost a "statement of consensus" about what the new science is telling us. And, as many have been trying to warn, the answer is: it's not good.
It seems like it's based on computer models, so it really depends on how well the models predict reality. Just fitting past data will not be sufficient.
any serious modelling will involve predictive runs with a starting point in the past, then matching the output to available actual time series data up to present time. I would be very surprised if this scientists' models were not subjected to this kind of routine testing.
That's not sufficient. If you write 10 different models, each with 10s of thousands of parameters until you get the results you want, it doesn't matter how accurately the model seems to predict in the past. Modelling is a tricky business that easily falls prey to such "data snooping" methods.
No shit. It's pretty obvious that the article isn't talking about that.
What it is talking about is a scientist who has a known track record of advancing his field and being ahead of the curve in creating useful models and predictions.
Since the article is meant for laymen, it is reasonable to use the phrase as a shortcut for the prior definition, unless the title "Scientist who has been right about a lot of important things has more models with relevant results for all of us".
Given the general rate of change and the impact even half this effect could have on climate, with a huge amount of hand waving, I'm inclined to fully support this assumption just so we have a slim chance of getting it 12% handled before it starts to progress even slightly toward disaster. And then, if it turns out to be greatly overstated, maybe we'll have tackled it prudently anyway.
Yet any action towards this end consumes an unfortunately finite amount of physical resources, money, and human concern. There are opportunity costs to be weighed for every course, and what if it is cheaper to build dikes and levees than enact the kind of sweeping social and economic change necessary to even dent such a prediction? Perhaps that time and money is better spent providing clean drinking water, combating prolific diseases, or eradicating slavery? These questions of balance are quickly forgotten with such breathless Cassandras begging for attention and scaring the people who are too quick to delegate reasoning.
The problem is of course that your solution requires the rich nations building those dikes and levees for all the third world nations of the world. Do you think that won't be a sweeping social and economic change?
Richer nations don't necessarily need to build walls around poorer nations to keep the water out. They may find it cheaper or otherwise preferable to build walls around themselves to stop the flow of people fleeing from the poorer nations.
Climate refugees have no legal status under the UN Refugee Convention:
> `there has been a collective, and rather successful, attempt to ignore the scope of the problem... so far there is no "home" for forced climate migrants in the international community, both literally and figuratively` -- Oli Brown [1]
Nations are already following this approach of literally building walls or pouring resources into improving their border security. For example, India is building a wall along its border with Bangladesh, and some of the nations in the EU are spending a lot of money and resources trying to intercept or discourage boats of immigrants from Africa [2].
> With 80 percent of its densely populated landmass lying near sea level, Bangladesh is often hailed as "ground zero" for climate change. A 1 meter rise in sea level, which seems likely by the end of the century, could flood almost one-fifth of the country. Some of the most vulnerable coastal districts in Bangladesh—Khulna, Satkhira, and Bagerhat—lie along India's border. -- [3]
> The Continent's richer, more northerly countries, great emitters of carbon and producers of wealth, barely contributed ships or aircraft to Frontex [4], and they processed a relative trickle of African asylum seekers. So Malta was itself a victim to this, he suggested. It was a power game: Northern Europe bullied southern Europe. Southern Europe fought within itself and with or against North Africa. The big stepped on the small, and the small stepped on the smaller. The migrants themselves were at the bottom. Here, too, shit rolls downhill. -- [2]
edit: as usual, I'm not writing this because I advocate this position, or think that it has any moral or ethical merit. But I think it is good to clearly understand that this is already happening and it will almost certainly get worse the further we get into this century.
And I did not write what I did because I'm unaware that those that make the argument that "it would be cheaper to adapt" never publicly add "... for us", because the argument gets a lot less palatable if you admit that your plan is to let the peoples of the developing world drown or starve to death...
What is your point? That it could somehow be more economically worthwhile to build a levy than deal with the underlying cause to the ocean rising? If that's correct than you honestly have 0 business weighing in on this decision in any way. At what point in your world does it become "economically viable" to save civilization?
There's a cost to preventing it and a cost to protecting ourselves from it. One of them must be cheaper. We already make seawalls to protect against tsunamis rather than somehow trying to weld all the fault lines back together. That's because it's cheaper and serves the same goal.
There's also a significant unknown cost from the level of uncertainty surrounding the effect of climate change. It could be drastic, or it could be mild. We don't know, but we're rolling the dice anyway due to inaction.
That's only if the goal is to stop the water from breaching the land, though. That should not be the goal, and if it is, at what point does the goal finally become preventing the water from rising in the first place?
I think the harm is that it would continue to rise and we still haven't done anything to treat the underlying cause. Then you enter an arms race by building levys/dams/dikes and we're still just treating the symptoms.
Not trying to be a skeptic for its own sake, but its worth noting that, buried deep in the article, you can find reference to an "unorthodox publishing practice" -- it hasn't yet been peer reviewed.
Apparently their results are too urgent to be peer-reviewed. The cynic in me wonders why they couldn't put it up on the ArXiv while waiting for the peer review process to run its course.
As a layperson I don't know what I'm supposed to make of these results. It looks like a bunch of prestigious authors held a press conference to convince non-specialist reporters that the end of civilization is a distinct possibility. But I know from my own research that you can convince the general public of anything as long as you can give a good presentation. Famous names and bold statements don't necessarily equal good science.
> The cynic in me wonders why they couldn't put it up on the ArXiv while waiting for the peer review process to run its course.
The arXiv is not mainstream in may fields, so they may not have thought of putting it there. I am sure they would have figured something out, but glacncing at the subject areas on the main page, it isn't immediately obvious where a study such as their should go. Physics/Nonlinear science, Statistics? Occasionally a meta-climate study appears in the astrophysics listings, but those are generally papers studying any interplay between astrophysical events and (often historical) climate change.
It would be great if more fields used arXiv. Some do have their own similar resources, separate from arXiv (the cryptography community comes to mind). But I am not aware if there are any associated with climate research.
If this were some no name scientist then you're point would be taken. But James Hansen - that's pretty authoritative. Regardless of where he publishes, people should pay attention.
I'm not sure if you are agreeing with me or being sarcastic, but the number of coauthors is not indicative of a broader consensus. I've published many papers with 20 or 30 coauthors - a handful of famous professors from one or two schools / modes of thought, and a bunch of postdocs, researchers, and grad students. We still had to go through peer review.
The thing you have to remember is that this is all speculation. If they're right, 16 authors can say they were the founders of a new model. If they're wrong... Well there's always another model to publish. The fact that a bunch of friends and colleagues can agree on something doesn't mean there is a wider consensus.
My point is if your can organize a paper with sixteen co-authors you can also arrange for peer review. Shortcutting the process makes no sense. Well, it makes perfect sense as propoganda. But not as sincere science.
>"The process of peer review and publication in the interactive scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) differs from traditional scientific journals. It is a two-stage process involving the scientific discussion forum Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions (ACPD), and it has been designed to utilize the full potential of the Internet to foster scientific discussion and enable rapid publication of scientific papers."
I'm not sure how well respected or wide-spread this "interactive" peer review process is, or if the study can also be submitted for more "traditional" peer review in the future.
That's the job of property speculators. Curiously, the prices they pay seems to indicate that they don't expect it to happen and are putting their money where their mouth is - unlike scientists and reporters who have nothing to lose by being wrong.
There has been a substantial increase in flood insurance costs across the world as reinsurers have adjusted the probabilities of catastrophic flood and storm events. The problem is so big that insurers outright refuse to even contemplate most properties in at-risk zones.
Whether it's man-made or not, I'm not sure there's much we can do at this point beyond adapting. Even if a country or continent went to zero emissions it wouldn't matter because of the rest of the world.
Your assumption is that if the US reduced their emissions as quickly as possible, it would likely not affect the emissions policies of other countries, but a lot of countries are refusing to cut emissions faster _because the US isn't doing so yet_.
The process of a unilateral, bilateral, or trilateral dramatic reduction would likely work as such:
1. The United States, China, or Europe, or two or all three would internally implement programs to drastically reduce emissions.
2. In order to maintain economic competitiveness, border adjustments (tariffs and subsidies) would be applied to imports and exports to and from countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs. If these tariffs and subsidies are sufficiently carefully applied, they would be legal under international trade agreements.[1]
3. Countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs would suffer economically by losing access to large export markets due to the border adjustments.
4. The countries would have their economic incentives shifted so that it becomes much more economically viable for them to apply similarly dramatic reductions themselves and regain access to the large markets.
5. As more countries apply similarly dramatic reductions, the total volume of border adjustments would decrease, reducing market distortions and increasing international trade efficiency, while maintaining each country's programs for dramatically decreasing carbon emissions.
Not just any country could do this, but the US could certainly start this process by itself. If the US started unilaterally, Europe would likely adopt similar measures and regain access to unadjusted imports and exports, which would create a very large bloc of high-consumption countries into which all countries (such as China and Australia) would want to regain cheap access.
[1] http://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/going-global/ (Would the WTO approve of carbon tax-related border adjustments? If the primary consequence was to discriminate because of carbon emissions rather than because of being a foreign country, then yes. Possibly...)
Logically, there is a great deal that could still be done to mitigate global warming. It is more a question of if enough people are knowledgeable of the issues and are actually willing to change their behaviour and apply pressure on the rest of society to force change.
I think there is a huge difference between a +3.0C world in 2100, with stable cumulative emissions, and a +4.5C world in 2100, where the cumulative emissions are still rising. The former is probably very unpleasant (i.e. many people dead, particularly those unfortunate enough to be born poor or in the wrong country), the latter denotes some kind of worsening failure state for human civilisation.
It is unfortunate that climate change is a long-term, uncertain consequence, a collective side-effect of economic activity, overpopulation, etc. If enough of the painful consequences of our actions could be experienced in the short term, across society, we'd probably have a very different attitude and a sharp motivation to change.
> One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. -- Jared Diamond
"In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels."
Unfortunately, for any action to take place, we'll have to lose NYC and Miami. Even then it'll be attributed to an angry, homophobic God instead of human-caused climate change by those who can afford to be air-lifted to their new chateau high above sea level. (We're still patriotically rebuilding New Orleans, FFS.)
I don't have much faith left that any level of terrifying science can have any effect on our plutocracy.
That said, this does feel extremely alarmist, even to me. Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science.
Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science.
Presumably this unfathomability is why people still invest millions of dollars in affected real estate every day.
It's interesting, no doubt. I should read everything with healthy skepticism, but really my initial gut reaction of "yeah right" was a little eye opening - if even I had a negative reaction to the assertions, I can't imagine what people who are skeptics of human-created climate change at all must think.
There are some topics, and types of humour, which really don't go down all that well. In particular they have a strong tendency to send intelligent conversation on some topics off the rails.
Distinguishing these from appropriate humour, or getting your tone just right, is a key sign of maturity.
If this is true, it's time to seriously consider geoengineering efforts to halt and reverse the trend.
It's highly irresponsible to automatically take such things off the table when a 10 foot sea-level rise is predicted in 50 years. We need to do everything we can to stop this.
If only humanity had discovered an energy source which was safer and cleaner than everything that came before, and produced no GHGs. Oh, and that we hadn't spent the last 60 years irrationally demonizing it.
If you're talking about nuclear power, it was our sloppy implementation, obscene cost overruns (WPPSS[1] anyone?) utter disregard of storage and disposal, and a small handful of spectacular disasters that was demonized. You know, nuclear power as practiced.
First: I'm not necessarily opposed to nuclear, at least in the near term. However it has numerous issues (see link below, Thoughts...). Addressing risks:
Coal mining is a strawman. The comparison you want to be making is to solar, wind, hydro, and biomass.
All of which compare well with, if not better than nuclear. And which don't suddenly consecrate 300-1,000 year human-exclusion wildlife parks, and threaten continent-wide areas with toxic poison which cannot be sensed directly.
From: "Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"
http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/
The problem with nuclear power is that, with little warning, things can go very, very wrong. From good neighbor to continent-contaminating, centuries-long nature-preserve (no humans allowed) creation. The uncertainty and disputes over nuclear accident consequences (Chernobyl deaths: a few dozen, hundreds, thousands, millions? Over what time? When do you close the books? What happens if containment around the sarcophogus fails some time into the future?).
The worst power plant accident of time, not a nuclear power plant failure, but a hydro station in China, Banqiao Dam. It's instructive several ways:
Any number of fairly simple methods would have hugely alleviated the impact of the disaster. Much as with major nuclear disasters, it was a cascade of failures, starting with poor management and a dysfunctional culture, amplified through poor design, adverse conditions, poor communications, delayed or absent warnings, and little or no disaster response (many of the deaths were attributed to starvation and disease, not drowning or other physical impacts).
A useful thing to keep in mind, though, is that after a dam break is done being a a massive disaster area, which typically resolves in a few hours to a few weeks, the land is no longer a glowing radioactive mess. It can be re-settled and populated as structures and infrasctructure are rebuilt. Zhumadian City, the region surrounding Banqiao, has a present population of over 7 million.
Or look up the story of the Johnstown Flood, worst dam break in US history (by deaths), which saw the emergence of the Red Cross, of national response to disasters, and changes in liability laws.
(Excepting Johnstown and Banqiao, dam failure mortality falls off rapidly, with another 8 disasters of 1,000+ lives. Wikipedia gives some 908 notable dams, and 137 hydroelectric facilities of 1GW+ net capcity.)
There are other questions, notably whether or not "deaths per GWh generation" is the most appropriate measure of risk. Particularly for a technology whose risk tail spans not years, decades, or even centuries, but millennia. Or longer.
Last I checked, there were few human institutions with lifespans of similar scale. Technical or otherwise.
Deer kill more people than sharks, but one is more fearsome. Jaws and The China Syndrome have served the same purpose. It wouldn't hurt for some folks to start making some pro-nuclear movies.
This is not a problem of absence of marketing (pro nuclear marketing was baroque in fact, but did not live up to their promises). The main problem with Fukushima probably is that everybody in charge where high on flippant pro-nuclear happy movies, and their emergency plan was "none, this will never happen ha-haa".
So please stop reducing this to the old: "people is just hysterical and nuclear is perfectly safe". It isn't and is getting tiresome. We have solid reasons to be upset of the blatant incompetence of the nuclear sector. No amount of propaganda will cover the reality that Prypiat is a ghost town.
Maybe its only the export movies, but I am having a tough time remembering any pro-nuclear Japanese movies. Fukushima was a systemic and human disaster, but the reactor type is an old model. We have a lot of old models, and not a lot of in-the-field innovation because of the anti-nucleaur media. If we would have had decent evolution, some of those plants would have been closed and replaced by safer plants. Since its all political, we have not deployed new technology in a timely manner.
Not, is not all political. Nuclear companies employ thousands of clever people, and of course have easy access to nuclear products and nuclear plants, pools, buildings, machines... Those companies are doing big money also.
Despite being very gifted people with almost unlimited resources unreachable for the common guy, nobody had find a realistic solution for the nuclear waste in 50 years and nobody knows still how to decontaminate a nuclear wasteland in a safe and fast way. Finding those holy grail will make them multibillonaries in two months so is not a problem of lack of motivation.
If you prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you can convert plutonium in a purring harmless kitten all politicians in the world will be at your feet droling and thinking about how to associate his/her name with the big success and what to do with the extra money now that expensive nuclear cemeteries payed with taxes are not needed anymore.
As a rule, I try not to blame other people for my own incompetence.
Yeah, if we're going to have a boondoggle, I'd rather it be one that we can just let sink into the ground and crumble, instead of having to guard it for centuries.
Nuclear power in theory (like communism in theory) may be great, but as practiced and paid for, I'm not impressed.
But as I've harped on, it'll be great for employment long after the plants are defunct.
The problem with wind power is that in many places it makes no sense.
It changes too quickly - faster than most other electricity production sources can cope.
If you have hydro or something that can ramp up and down production as quickly as wind does - and the grid stability to be able to do so - wind could be great.
But if you don't, it's not so great. And unfortunately far too often wind gets put in places that don't have that ability for political reasons.
Grid-scale energy storage would be great - if we actually had it in any meaningful amount.
These are all being rolled out right now in various places and we've not exploited these to anywhere near their full potential so we'd be best to do so before calling a halt to expanding wind (or solar, which has similar issues and solutions).
In the short term gas burning plants that we only turn on when we actually need to is a stop gap measure that isn't perfect, but is better than just running them (or worse coal) all the time.
Unfortunately, all of those mitigation techniques have problems of their own. (Not to mention that you glossed right over the politics.)
With AC power, bigger grids can create instabilities. Look at the 2005 Java–Bali blackout, for instance. Cascading failure. Or the Northeast blackout. Cascading failure. Etc.(With DC power, you have the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Among other things, you need less failsafes for DC than with AC, and it's easier to bootstrap the grid.) You can avoid this by... making grids less interdependent. Which you cannot do if you're tying them together for purposes of keeping them running. (And smart grids mean that things go wrong more badly when they do go bad.)
Lots of wind turbines geographically distributed would be great - except, of course, that wind power isn't available everywhere. Remember, the power carried by wind scales roughly as the cube of the windspeed. There's a relatively small window of "enough, but not too much" where wind power makes sense.
Ditto - pumped hydro I talked about, but again, you have to have a watershed with enough capacity. Which isn't the case everywhere.
Demand management... Good luck with that. That's politics, as much as anything. We have come to expect reliable power, and trying to convince people otherwise is an uphill battle, as it is very much a regression.
And as for small-scale gas-burning plants... Two things. First, by the time you've added up the wind turbines (again, wind turbines are hideous for the environment to make!), the additional infrastructure required to be able to inject power safely at distributed points, the additional infrastructure for a smart grid, and the gas-burning plants, things look much less obvious. And secondly, gas-burning plants are either inefficient or don't scale fast enough to be worth it.
Oh, and they are expensive. It may be better to sink the absurd amounts of money that is required for wind (especially when you realize that gas-burning plants are really expensive for their energy output) elsewhere.
The first person to suggest building the electrical grids we already have would have seemed a bit of a visionary, because they are truly epic bits of engineering but lots of problems have been solved along the way and continue to need solved as thing evolve.
Throwing your hands up at the first hint of potential problems is basically a variant on the FUD we know so well in computing, as is claiming wind turbines are "hideous" for the environment. People love that old switcheroo, "electric cars are worse for the environment than ICE cars", "Solar panels use more carbon than they will ever save" etc. except when you look at the serious studies done by actual experts you find these questions were dealt with thoroughly years before, and the people who keep repeating them aren't interested in facts.
Wind turbines aren't magic fairy dust, they're technology. They can be used well, they can be used badly, they can get better. One of the big changes is that larger turbines can be deployed successfully in lots more places and take advantage of slower average windspeeds. That's not revolutionary, but that and thousands of other improvements are making wind and solar cheaper every day. The problems that remain are far more solvable, and cost-efficient to deal with, than dealing with the consequences of continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere.
Many nations are already building/converting gas generators just to avoid using coal, an on balance this is a good thing from a pollution and carbon perspective. Making use of stuff that already exists to plug gaps as we go forward really isn't that radical a suggestion.
But again you're missing what I was saying with my original comment - namely that wind turbines seem to be far too often built where it makes political sense, not necessarily where it actually makes sense.
As is far too often the case for renewable energy, it seems.
Why have you singled out wind and renewable energy to be affected by politics? I think the current nuclear plans in the UK, the fracking support, and the anti-wind hysteria all have very strong political aspects. The IMF recently suggested fossil fuel is heavily subsidized since it's pollution is externalized.
I don't see anything about wind power that makes it particularly susceptible to politics, in fact the decentralized nature of wind and solar seems to make it a bit less likely for one entity to be given monopoloy rights and therefore be able to kickback large sums to politicians and lobbyists.
This comment chain was started by talking about wind. And people here seem to take it for granted that nuclear is affected by politics, but tend to be fuzzier about things like wind. Wind power is very political in nature. On the one hand, tax credits / etc. On the other hand, regulations as to where you can put wind turbines, etc. And general discontent about bat deaths / noise complaints / etc. (And in some cases, at least, for good reason.) And unmetered (and as such, unknown, which is "interesting") power used for things like rotating the wind turbines, feathering them, and keeping them turning when there isn't wind.
They're literally saying civilization itself is at stake.
"It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Whatever has happened in the past, this calls for all possible steps to be taken ASAP.
I grant that 10 ft is scary. But look at Holland. Dikes everywhere. At the same time we can look to using nature to help us by making [dams](http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059998611).
Dikes are far less troubling that geo-engineering. They are probably about the same cost too.
"Crisis" mode eh - once that's on the cards then you can push all sorts of things through. You should look into the termination issues with geoengineering (once you pop, it's very hard to stop). Also.. there will likely be trade off zones where the climate will get very bad. Under some models you shaft parts of Africa, but if you do things other ways then you can stuff N. America. Who gets to decide?
Have a read of "This changes everything". Do we _really_ want to go to geoengineering and, frankly, gamble that we've got it covered. I don't like that idea.
> not predicting a 60 percent drop in the light and heat emitted by the Sun, but a drop in magnetic activity in the Sun. This has only a marginal effect on the Sun’s light/heat output.
Phil Plait, who does the Bad Astronomy blog, did a well-calibrated and respectful job with that piece. Phil is well hooked in to the solar community, so he is a good person to be consulting. Thanks for linking to it.
Basically, the uproar was caused by a very speculative theory [1] that solar magnetic activity might be decreasing in the coming decades. This concept is not well-established; in fact, it is better-described as a highly speculative theory coming from a data extrapolation by a very small group of solar researchers, at one institution, over the last year or so.
But even if their solar claims turn out to be true -- very big if given their methodology -- they (A) can't (and don't) link their magnetic claims to irradiance, and (B) the irradiance effect of sunspot/magnetic change is strongly believed to be quite small relative to other effects anyway, especially anthropogenic ones.
That "mini-ice-age" claim has been very quickly questioned by many. But the Gulf Stream reportedly exhibits strong signs of slowing down, which to me sounds like a much more important factor for the UK.
