8 ms·

Climate Slowdown Means Extreme Rates of Warming 'Not as Likely'

31 points by rpm4321 13y ago

hristov 13y ago
I am going to quote the end of the article in order to make valiant attempt to prevent a budding flame war: ----------- "Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real? "None. No comfort whatsoever," he said. ----------- So global warming is still real and it is still happening. It is just that the rate of warming has slowed down somewhat.
- sultezdukes 13y ago
  You're not trying to prevent a budding flame war, you're just trying to preempt the "deniers" from denying. And I guess you didn't get the memo. You can't call it global warming now. You have to call it climate change. That way, no matter what happens and no matter how cold it gets, evil man and evil capitalism can still be blamed.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    Give it a rest. "Climate Change" is a term for any change in climate in any timeframe. The ice age was climate change. Global Warming refers to man made climate change. It's a more specific term.
  - throwaway9848 13y ago
    He's quoting the article verbatim.
  - btilly 13y ago
    And I guess you didn't get the memo. You can't call it global warming now. You have to call it climate change. That way, no matter what happens and no matter how cold it gets, evil man and evil capitalism can still be blamed. If you're trolling, that kind of trolling is not wanted around here. If you're not trolling, then you didn't understand the article. This study finds a rate of warming at 80% the consensus average of predictions from several years ago, and well within the previous uncertainty bars. So evidence of warming is getting stronger, not weaker, even though the exact predictions of how fast it is warming are coming in on the conservative side of previous estimates.
    - Falling3 13y ago
      >If you're not trolling, then you didn't understand the article. Not only did he not understand the article, he doesn't understand any part of climate science.
    - gwright 13y ago
      The dispute has not been about 'warming' in the abstract but about 'catastrophic warming'. So while the evidence for 'warming' may be getting stronger, the evidence for 'catastrophic warming' would seem to be getting weaker. The longer we go without significant warming, the lower that growth rate will get and the weaker the argument for a catastrophic warming will be.
      - btilly 13y ago
        Define catastrophic. At current rates of change we are looking in near decades at changing rainfall patterns that will result in regions and countries suffering permanent drought, and others suffering regular flooding and other forms of extreme weather. Among the areas predicted to have severe and permanent drought is the southeastern USA. Furthermore we are learning about new risks. For instance ocean acidification has put us on a possibly irreversible path towards world-wide mass extinctions of organisms that use calcium carbonate for protection. This includes coral and shellfish. Nobody knows what resulting ecosystem changes will happen, or what the consequences for commercial fisheries which are a critical food supply for populations around the world. The only way in which these things do not qualify as "catastrophic" is in comparison to worse catastrophes that were within the realm of theoretical possibility, but which now seem less likely. For the planet as a whole, and for people on the planet, the current course bears a series of inevitable catastrophes in our future.
        gwright 13y ago
        It is all about the feedback. No one disputes the physics of warming created by CO2 emissions. But that warming is insufficient to create the run-away warming predicted in climate models. The increases necessary to generate the catastrophic scenarios that you (and many others describe) requires that there be an aggregate positive feedback mechanism in the climate system to magnify the CO2 warming (the anthropomorphic warming). If you read any of the literature you'll see this refered to as the 'climate sensitivity'. No one knows the actual climate sensitivity relative to CO2 concentrations. No one knows what all the various positive and negative feedback mechanisms are. These are all suppositions by climate scientists that are plugged into their models in order to make the models accurate output the historical record. Then there is a grand leap of faith that says that the models will accurate predict the future record. Except that for the last 10-20 years, the models have been wrong. CO2 has increased but the temperature has not changed according to the models prediction. The original article says: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that the short-term temperature rise would most likely be 1-3C (1.8-5.4F). But in this new analysis, by only including the temperatures from the last decade, the projected range would be 0.9-2.0C. So the models will be tweaked (for example by reducing the climate sensitivity) in order to generate output that matches the new historical record which has 10-20 years of no statistically significant warming. The problem with all this is that the models can always be tweaked to match the historical record while at the same time generating whatever future prediction you want. And if that doesn't work, you just tweak the model again. I'll start to believe that the models are reasonable when they remain unchanged for several decades while still tracking the actual observations.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    You sound angry. Relax. Take a deep breath. Maybe go outside and enjoy the nice late-May weather. Hell, it may not be a bad idea to fire up the grill, even, and make yourself a nice hamburger or hot dog. I promise you will feel better afterward.
  - emmett 13y ago
    1) I agree with you that the parent comment is not preempting anything, it's just a political jab. 2) You're simply wrong that the name change to "climate change" was a leftist thing. Luntz is a chief political strategist for the right wing in America: The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as "conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people" think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behaviour... that turns off many voters". http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli...
  - rickhanlonii 13y ago
    You're using two terms which are propositions (that is, they can be either true or false), and demonizing them as if they're subjectively defined and able to be manipulated for individual or group gains. That's simply not the case. Global warming is the fact that the global temperature of Earth has been rising since the 19th century. It either has been warming, or it has not been warming. By fact, it has. Climate Change is a statical fact. If the Earth is in a state of Climate Change, then there is a significant change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over a given time period. Whether or not the change is hot or cold is irrelevant, as both cases are alarming. It's called Climate Change now because it's better defined, characteristic, and accurate than the rather obvious and uninformative term 'global warming.' The planet is not just warming, it's warming at a rate that is statistically significant. If that warming slows, but still stays above a significant rate, then we're still in a state of Climate Change and should still be alarmed. Now, if you want to have a conversation about the validity of Climate Change with integrity, you would need to focus around the merit of the statistical thresholds defined. It could be the case that the thresholds in which leading climatologists have set are too low to merit being alarmed about. Make that case if you can. Otherwise, there's really no basis to make an argument against it.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Poor Al Gore and his claims that global warming was "accelerating". Next time better wait a little before early conclusions.
  - beedogs 13y ago
    I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of garbage on Drudge-linked articles, not on HN.
    - quiadesso 13y ago
      I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of butthurt on 4chan, not-- oh wait. lol
    - leohutson 13y ago
      If nerds experience a dissidence between their own judgements and reality, we tend to distort reality to conform to our worldview rather than the other way around. That's why we tend to get hard when we are presented with studies that are cherry picked to cater to our demographics values.
      - wnernwkerlmwe 13y ago
        You may "get hard" over confirmation bias, but a lot of us "nerds" are scientifically trained and actually do a pretty good job of interpreting reality. Sure, no-one is perfect, but "nerds" tend to be better than other "demographics".
    - wnernwkerlmwe 13y ago
      Yeah, I might as well have just stayed on Reddit. I suppose, in a sense, people like this are part of a concerted effort to hack popular opinion.
rayiner 13y ago
The thing that really put climate change in perspective for me was when a professor pointed out that the last ice age was just 4-5C colder than today, but that meant that the place where we were sitting, on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, was under a mile of ice.
- glurgh 13y ago
  That seems like a (probably inadvertently) awful example. Chicago is right smack in the middle of the 'tongue' of the Laurentide ice sheet that sticks out way to the south - even today, without miles of ice the climate of NYC and Barcelona are quite unalike while being at the same latitude. At the point of maximum extent global mean temperatures were already rising, there were great big gobs of the Pleistocene in which they were far lower. 'Mean surface temperature' is something that can be directly measured or estimated from paleometeorologic proxies but without models for the underlying mechanisms, it's pretty uninformative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhereIsTheHeatOfGlobalWarming.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhereIsTheHeatOfGlobalWarm... And the linked references give some idea of how very misleading, taken at face value, mean global temperatures can be. Even just doing a bit of napkin physics - if one applied the energy needed to heat the top meter of ocean by one degree to the first meter of air, it would be like taking a blowtorch to the layer of air in question. Examples like that are pithy but they're almost like walking up to a denialist and saying 'I want you to hit me in the face, as hard as you can'.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The point is that a relatively small change to the average can mean major changes locally. It's irrelevant what the ice coverage in New York was. We weren't in New York.
    - glurgh 13y ago
      The 'change to the average' is not small. Local changes exceed that all the time, though. I never mentioned the ice coverage of New York. It's an ass of an example. It's not like I'm calling you an ass for using it but come on. It might have convinced you but it's bad. Many people with a secondary education have airplane lift taught to them in terms of the Bernoulli principle, even if, at the end of the day, it doesn't actually explain lift.
flagnog 13y ago
in other words: we don't understand it, but we're still going to blame it on mankind. we can make short range predictions, but still don't know all of the variables that are controlling the climate.
- rayiner 13y ago
  In still other words: it doesn't matter what's causing it, we're fucked if the average temperature in the breadbasket of the U.S. becomes similar to that of Texas, as is projected. The question isn't: did we cause it, the question is: can we slow it down?
  - harryh 13y ago
    If mankind is causing it, then we're likely to keep causing it, and be fucked in the way you describe. If mankind is not causing it, then we don't know what's going on and our predictions about the long term (next 100 years) trend are likely wrong.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      The projections are at least partly or mostly based on the trends, which means that even if scientists are wrong about the cause, the projections are probably still right. So I think we're fucked either way. Some place more than others. Me, I'm planning on holing up in Oregon with the in-laws to prepare to defend the state's water resources from invading Californians.
      - harryh 13y ago
        Ya, if anything we might be less fucked if it's human caused. Because that way we have some hope (however small) of reducing our carbon emissions. If it's something else out of our control then we could be well and truly fucked. Unless it just suddenly stops happening. Stay tuned! Oregon does seem like a pretty good plan.
    - flagnog 13y ago
sethbannon 13y ago
These two sentences summarize the article pretty well: "The authors calculate that over the coming decades global average temperatures will warm about 20% more slowly than expected. But when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates."
- JeremyKolb 13y ago
  Thanks for the summary, I started reading but wasn't going to get far on this one.
  - ramblerman 13y ago
    Why? I think climate change is happening personally,but why the need to cling to it like religion. If evidence comes out, look at it, revaluate, repeat...
    - btilly 13y ago
      The problem is that evidence has come out, been confirmed, etc multiple times. Evidence is clear that if we want to avoid the consequences we need to act. However we can't act, in significant part because a large portion of the population is unwilling to believe that the consequences exist.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ankitml 13y ago
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with this article, as the article paints a picture different from the title. 1. Likelihood in long term remains the same. (title betrays its readers) 2. In medium term likelihood of most extreme scenarios is less than what was expected. (hey ho, extreme scenarios are not to account for, thats why they are extreme) 3. people should be exactly as concerned as before about what climate change is doing ANyway, the whole news-article is based on one publication. Meh. I would rather ignore the details of one publication because minor difference in details dont matter. The broad picture remains the same.

31 points by rpm4321 13y ago

I am going to quote the end of the article in order to make valiant attempt to prevent a budding flame war: ----------- "Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real? "None. No comfort whatsoever," he said. ----------- So global warming is still real and it is still happening. It is just that the rate of warming has slowed down somewhat.

sultezdukes 13y ago
You're not trying to prevent a budding flame war, you're just trying to preempt the "deniers" from denying. And I guess you didn't get the memo. You can't call it global warming now. You have to call it climate change. That way, no matter what happens and no matter how cold it gets, evil man and evil capitalism can still be blamed.
- Afforess 13y ago
  Give it a rest. "Climate Change" is a term for any change in climate in any timeframe. The ice age was climate change. Global Warming refers to man made climate change. It's a more specific term.
- throwaway9848 13y ago
  He's quoting the article verbatim.
- btilly 13y ago
  And I guess you didn't get the memo. You can't call it global warming now. You have to call it climate change. That way, no matter what happens and no matter how cold it gets, evil man and evil capitalism can still be blamed. If you're trolling, that kind of trolling is not wanted around here. If you're not trolling, then you didn't understand the article. This study finds a rate of warming at 80% the consensus average of predictions from several years ago, and well within the previous uncertainty bars. So evidence of warming is getting stronger, not weaker, even though the exact predictions of how fast it is warming are coming in on the conservative side of previous estimates.
  - Falling3 13y ago
    >If you're not trolling, then you didn't understand the article. Not only did he not understand the article, he doesn't understand any part of climate science.
  - gwright 13y ago
    The dispute has not been about 'warming' in the abstract but about 'catastrophic warming'. So while the evidence for 'warming' may be getting stronger, the evidence for 'catastrophic warming' would seem to be getting weaker. The longer we go without significant warming, the lower that growth rate will get and the weaker the argument for a catastrophic warming will be.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Define catastrophic. At current rates of change we are looking in near decades at changing rainfall patterns that will result in regions and countries suffering permanent drought, and others suffering regular flooding and other forms of extreme weather. Among the areas predicted to have severe and permanent drought is the southeastern USA. Furthermore we are learning about new risks. For instance ocean acidification has put us on a possibly irreversible path towards world-wide mass extinctions of organisms that use calcium carbonate for protection. This includes coral and shellfish. Nobody knows what resulting ecosystem changes will happen, or what the consequences for commercial fisheries which are a critical food supply for populations around the world. The only way in which these things do not qualify as "catastrophic" is in comparison to worse catastrophes that were within the realm of theoretical possibility, but which now seem less likely. For the planet as a whole, and for people on the planet, the current course bears a series of inevitable catastrophes in our future.
      - gwright 13y ago
        It is all about the feedback. No one disputes the physics of warming created by CO2 emissions. But that warming is insufficient to create the run-away warming predicted in climate models. The increases necessary to generate the catastrophic scenarios that you (and many others describe) requires that there be an aggregate positive feedback mechanism in the climate system to magnify the CO2 warming (the anthropomorphic warming). If you read any of the literature you'll see this refered to as the 'climate sensitivity'. No one knows the actual climate sensitivity relative to CO2 concentrations. No one knows what all the various positive and negative feedback mechanisms are. These are all suppositions by climate scientists that are plugged into their models in order to make the models accurate output the historical record. Then there is a grand leap of faith that says that the models will accurate predict the future record. Except that for the last 10-20 years, the models have been wrong. CO2 has increased but the temperature has not changed according to the models prediction. The original article says: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that the short-term temperature rise would most likely be 1-3C (1.8-5.4F). But in this new analysis, by only including the temperatures from the last decade, the projected range would be 0.9-2.0C. So the models will be tweaked (for example by reducing the climate sensitivity) in order to generate output that matches the new historical record which has 10-20 years of no statistically significant warming. The problem with all this is that the models can always be tweaked to match the historical record while at the same time generating whatever future prediction you want. And if that doesn't work, you just tweak the model again. I'll start to believe that the models are reasonable when they remain unchanged for several decades while still tracking the actual observations.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  You sound angry. Relax. Take a deep breath. Maybe go outside and enjoy the nice late-May weather. Hell, it may not be a bad idea to fire up the grill, even, and make yourself a nice hamburger or hot dog. I promise you will feel better afterward.
- emmett 13y ago
  1) I agree with you that the parent comment is not preempting anything, it's just a political jab. 2) You're simply wrong that the name change to "climate change" was a leftist thing. Luntz is a chief political strategist for the right wing in America: The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as "conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people" think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behaviour... that turns off many voters". http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli...
- rickhanlonii 13y ago
  You're using two terms which are propositions (that is, they can be either true or false), and demonizing them as if they're subjectively defined and able to be manipulated for individual or group gains. That's simply not the case. Global warming is the fact that the global temperature of Earth has been rising since the 19th century. It either has been warming, or it has not been warming. By fact, it has. Climate Change is a statical fact. If the Earth is in a state of Climate Change, then there is a significant change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over a given time period. Whether or not the change is hot or cold is irrelevant, as both cases are alarming. It's called Climate Change now because it's better defined, characteristic, and accurate than the rather obvious and uninformative term 'global warming.' The planet is not just warming, it's warming at a rate that is statistically significant. If that warming slows, but still stays above a significant rate, then we're still in a state of Climate Change and should still be alarmed. Now, if you want to have a conversation about the validity of Climate Change with integrity, you would need to focus around the merit of the statistical thresholds defined. It could be the case that the thresholds in which leading climatologists have set are too low to merit being alarmed about. Make that case if you can. Otherwise, there's really no basis to make an argument against it.
ekianjo 13y ago
Poor Al Gore and his claims that global warming was "accelerating". Next time better wait a little before early conclusions.
- beedogs 13y ago
  I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of garbage on Drudge-linked articles, not on HN.
  - quiadesso 13y ago
    I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of butthurt on 4chan, not-- oh wait. lol
  - leohutson 13y ago
    If nerds experience a dissidence between their own judgements and reality, we tend to distort reality to conform to our worldview rather than the other way around. That's why we tend to get hard when we are presented with studies that are cherry picked to cater to our demographics values.
    - wnernwkerlmwe 13y ago
      You may "get hard" over confirmation bias, but a lot of us "nerds" are scientifically trained and actually do a pretty good job of interpreting reality. Sure, no-one is perfect, but "nerds" tend to be better than other "demographics".
  - wnernwkerlmwe 13y ago
    Yeah, I might as well have just stayed on Reddit. I suppose, in a sense, people like this are part of a concerted effort to hack popular opinion.

rayiner 13y ago

The thing that really put climate change in perspective for me was when a professor pointed out that the last ice age was just 4-5C colder than today, but that meant that the place where we were sitting, on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, was under a mile of ice.

glurgh 13y ago
That seems like a (probably inadvertently) awful example. Chicago is right smack in the middle of the 'tongue' of the Laurentide ice sheet that sticks out way to the south - even today, without miles of ice the climate of NYC and Barcelona are quite unalike while being at the same latitude. At the point of maximum extent global mean temperatures were already rising, there were great big gobs of the Pleistocene in which they were far lower. 'Mean surface temperature' is something that can be directly measured or estimated from paleometeorologic proxies but without models for the underlying mechanisms, it's pretty uninformative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhereIsTheHeatOfGlobalWarming.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhereIsTheHeatOfGlobalWarm... And the linked references give some idea of how very misleading, taken at face value, mean global temperatures can be. Even just doing a bit of napkin physics - if one applied the energy needed to heat the top meter of ocean by one degree to the first meter of air, it would be like taking a blowtorch to the layer of air in question. Examples like that are pithy but they're almost like walking up to a denialist and saying 'I want you to hit me in the face, as hard as you can'.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The point is that a relatively small change to the average can mean major changes locally. It's irrelevant what the ice coverage in New York was. We weren't in New York.
  - glurgh 13y ago
    The 'change to the average' is not small. Local changes exceed that all the time, though. I never mentioned the ice coverage of New York. It's an ass of an example. It's not like I'm calling you an ass for using it but come on. It might have convinced you but it's bad. Many people with a secondary education have airplane lift taught to them in terms of the Bernoulli principle, even if, at the end of the day, it doesn't actually explain lift.

flagnog 13y ago

in other words: we don't understand it, but we're still going to blame it on mankind. we can make short range predictions, but still don't know all of the variables that are controlling the climate.

rayiner 13y ago
In still other words: it doesn't matter what's causing it, we're fucked if the average temperature in the breadbasket of the U.S. becomes similar to that of Texas, as is projected. The question isn't: did we cause it, the question is: can we slow it down?
- harryh 13y ago
  If mankind is causing it, then we're likely to keep causing it, and be fucked in the way you describe. If mankind is not causing it, then we don't know what's going on and our predictions about the long term (next 100 years) trend are likely wrong.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The projections are at least partly or mostly based on the trends, which means that even if scientists are wrong about the cause, the projections are probably still right. So I think we're fucked either way. Some place more than others. Me, I'm planning on holing up in Oregon with the in-laws to prepare to defend the state's water resources from invading Californians.
    - harryh 13y ago
      Ya, if anything we might be less fucked if it's human caused. Because that way we have some hope (however small) of reducing our carbon emissions. If it's something else out of our control then we could be well and truly fucked. Unless it just suddenly stops happening. Stay tuned! Oregon does seem like a pretty good plan.
  - flagnog 13y ago

sethbannon 13y ago

These two sentences summarize the article pretty well: "The authors calculate that over the coming decades global average temperatures will warm about 20% more slowly than expected. But when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates."

JeremyKolb 13y ago
Thanks for the summary, I started reading but wasn't going to get far on this one.
- ramblerman 13y ago
  Why? I think climate change is happening personally,but why the need to cling to it like religion. If evidence comes out, look at it, revaluate, repeat...
  - btilly 13y ago
    The problem is that evidence has come out, been confirmed, etc multiple times. Evidence is clear that if we want to avoid the consequences we need to act. However we can't act, in significant part because a large portion of the population is unwilling to believe that the consequences exist.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ankitml 13y ago

Not sure what they wanted to achieve with this article, as the article paints a picture different from the title. 1. Likelihood in long term remains the same. (title betrays its readers) 2. In medium term likelihood of most extreme scenarios is less than what was expected. (hey ho, extreme scenarios are not to account for, thats why they are extreme) 3. people should be exactly as concerned as before about what climate change is doing ANyway, the whole news-article is based on one publication. Meh. I would rather ignore the details of one publication because minor difference in details dont matter. The broad picture remains the same.