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The thing about global warming that I don't know and would like some answers on is how bad is it going to get? Is the worst case scenario mass-extinction? It do

The thing about global warming that I don't know and would like some answers on is how bad is it going to get? Is the worst case scenario mass-extinction? It doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere with reducing carbon emissions and I'm pretty pessimistic on the politics since it involves international cooperation, which there isn't much of between the big polluters. Does the worst case seem as likely as I think it is?

vixin 12y ago
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/02/global-temperature-update-still-no-global-warming-for-17-years-10-months/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/02/global-temperature-upd... gives 'data from RSS dataset for the 214 months October 1996 to July 2014'. You can make your own projections: they are likely to be as accurate as any others taking into account the success rate of climate modellers.
- graycat 12y ago
  Many thanks for the link. Thanks, I needed that. So, the link has not only temperature data but the IPCC predictions. Terrific. I put the link where I can find it easily and won't lose it. I'd been hoping for just some such article. Terrific.
  - bjz_ 12y ago
    WUWT is notorious for cherry picking data. Be very skeptical of their claims. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-19...
    - anthonyb 12y ago
      I don't think that's cherry picked; it looks like an outright fabrication to me. What are the odds that a line of regression on a graph like that would come out to exactly +0.00C?
      - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
        Out of a sufficiently noisy continuous dataset, you can actually do that quite easily simply by moving the start position until you hit exactly +0.00C. Which is what I suspect he did. If you move it forwards a few months, you get negatives until you leave that one anomalous spike out, and if you move it backwards, you start to get positives very quickly.
    - graycat 12y ago
      I didn't pay much attention to the fitted line. To take such a line seriously, need a lot of mathematical assumptions in practice nearly always impractical or impossible to get. I did pay attention to what I said, the temperature data and the IPCC projections. I was glad to see both. So, let's see: The link to skeptical science says that there is a lot of warming but it is in the oceans and that their work considering the 'energy' (i.e., temperature?) in the first 700 or 3000 meters shows that. And that warming is supposed to have been caused by warming of the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect of human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. So, we can't see the warming in the atmosphere, but somehow the atmosphere is supposed to be warming the oceans. Hmm. But, pursuing that point, or such points, of which there are many, to be productive needs much more in data, etc. than we have. Again, I was happy just seeing the basic temperature data and the IPCC predictions. That's better than pictures of polar bears and icebergs and claims that each hot period, cold period, wet period, dry period, change in wildlife population, blizzard, tornado, hurricane, etc. is evidence of 'climate change' caused by human use of CO2. For 'climate change theory', I like the one, "follow the money". I guess if I were running a news company with revenue from ads from eyeballs, then I'd take any excuse I could to write stories to get people up on their hind legs. Old standards were scandal from sinful, evil humans, danger, i.e., the sky is falling. Better yet is the sky is falling caused sinful/evil humans. Better yet is a 'theme' that each day can turn into yet another eyeball grabbing headline and news 'story'. So, I'd push 'global warming', oops, now 'climate change', too. And, I would have screamed about CFCs and the ozone and how happy I was to be ruining the air conditioners of millions of cars (including two of mine). I'd scream about anything I could, trash in the oceans, death of the oceans, death of the rain forests, loss of US farm land top soil, genetically modified crops, pictures of the arctic showing no ice (can get those in some areas, can vary from year to year, of the arctic during summers), etc. For the climate change story, I'd show pictures of clouds of water vapor from the cooling towers of nuke electric generating plants and hint that the clouds of water were dangerous CO2 from sinful/evil humans. For any smokestack putting out anything visible, I'd hint that it was CO2. I'd get quotes from Tom Friedman that CO2 absorbs sunlight (of course, that's false; CO2 absorbs in just three narrow bands, all out in the infrared). I'd push anything I could that would get eyeballs. It's a very old story: Claim that humans are sinful and/or evil. From that claim, a lot of churches long got a lot of revenue, and the old English morality plays got lots of eyeballs. A big theme in story telling is transgression from sinful/evil humans, retribution from an angry god, and finally redemption from sacrifice. So, for the transgression of sinful/evil humans and their emissions of CO2, the retribution is 'climate change', right, with lots of coastal cities flooding, coral reefs being bleached, the tropics converted to deserts, the northern temperate zone pushed to the arctic circle, nearly all fauna extinct, etc., and the redemption is sacrifice, e.g., give up cars, air conditioning, washing machines, return to walking or bicycles, grow own food, get electric power, catch as catch can, from wind and solar, etc. So, more news stories, lots each day, on each little part of this old trilogy. But, instead of such new blizzards of nonsense, I was happy to see the actual temperature record and the IPCC predictions. There's a thing about predictions: People can remember them. While the science for predicting temperature is from grimly difficult up to too difficult to do accurately now, we are quite good at measuring temperature, actual temperature in degrees K, C, or F. Then when there is a prediction of temperature, after a decade or so we get to compare the prediction and the measurements. The link I responded to lets us do that.
- tonyedgecombe 12y ago
  Cherry picking dates isn't helpful, 2010 was the hottest year on record followed by 2005.
- anthonyb 12y ago
  > "By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley" That would be Lord Christopher Monckton, notorious climate quack.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    But not a member of the House of Lords, though he frequently claims otherwise - http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/2011/letter-to-viscount-monckton-20110715.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/...
pdonis 12y ago
> how bad is it going to get? The only honest answer is, nobody knows. Which means that we should not be making plans based on the belief that we can predict what's going to happen; instead, we should be planning to be adaptable, so that we can deal with whatever happens.
- machrider 12y ago
  What does that even mean?
  - pdonis 12y ago
    It means, for example, that we should not be emasculating the world's economy in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Instead, we should be concentrating on making the world's economy stronger, so that it will be easier and cheaper to cope with whatever happens to the climate in the future. If it gets warmer, we'll be able to deal; if it doesn't get warmer, we won't have made everybody poor.
    - tzs 12y ago
      You are making the assumption that there is no point beyond which we can no longer cope with the problem no matter how much money we throw at it. Can you justify that assumption?
rm999 12y ago
This wikipedia article point to some good sources on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_risk_from_global_warming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_risk_from_global_war... The tldr is that many scientists do believe that a significant % of species will go extinct at the current rate of global warming. But there is the standard uncertainty, as there always is in complex topics like this. >There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5 °C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5 °C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.
- justin66 12y ago
  > The tldr is that many scientists do believe that a significant % of species will go extinct at the current rate of global warming. A significant % of species ARE going extinct, today, under the current circumstances.
bjz_ 12y ago
So far we have been tracking the worst case scenario models. If feedback loops like the release of the methane stored in the arctic permafrost begin to run away from us, it could get pretty bad. We haven't seen most of the warming yet - most of it has been going into the oceans, but now they are reaching their capacity. The earth's climate is a complex system that is incredibly tricky to predict. But the more we know about it, the worse things seem to be. :( http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/06/new-video-reports-on-unstoppable-antarctic-glacial-melting/ http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/06/new-video-repo... http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/02/video-on-frozen-dirt-and-methane-we-cannot-go-there/ http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/02/video-on-froze...
- spingsprong 12y ago
  One factor that makes Methane not quite as bad as it could be, is it has an atmospheric half-life around 10% of CO2's So if a lot of Methane does get released into the atmosphere, in a couple of decades most of it will have broken down and disappeared.
  - regularfry 12y ago
    That doesn't mean that the climate will return to where it was before the release. It could find a new stable point at a higher temperature than it is now due to changes in the Earth's albedo, among other things. Also, "disappeared": what it ends up breaking down into is carbon dioxide and water vapour, both greenhouse gases in their own right.
    - pja 12y ago
      But at least they're much less powerful greenhouse gases than methane itself (IIRC).
- pdonis 12y ago
  > most of it has been going into the oceans, but now they are reaching their capacity Huh? The oceans can absorb a lot more heat. If you run the numbers, the heat that's been added to the oceans in the last half century (according to the IPCC, whose numbers I'm not sure I believe because up until the Argo buoys started being deployed in the last ten years or so, the data was very sparse, but that's a separate question) has raised their temperature by about a tenth of a degree Celsius.
hrvbr 12y ago
Yes, the worst is mass extinction because the worst greenhouse-effect gas is water vapor. The risk with human-generated chemicals is that they bootstrap a transfer of ocean water into the atmosphere in a vicious circle: more heat => more evaporation => more heat. The Earth could become as hot as Venus. I don't think scientists have enough informations to tell if the Earth would have ways to stop this circle. Even if it did, the event would be bad for humans.
- anthonyb 12y ago
  Water vapour has a very short life cycle in the atmosphere, so while it's theoretically the worst, it's not actually particularly bad in the long term, and it's not likely to change by much. There's also some question as to the cooling effect of clouds. CO2 on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for quite a few years (30-95 according to wikipedia), so it's far worse in the long term.
anthonyb 12y ago
Yes, the worst case is pretty bad, both for us and life on earth. We're currently in the middle of a large extinction event, so the biosphere is probably pretty fragile even without the ongoing global warming. If it "helps", the last time CO2 levels were this high was in the middle of the Permian. 3-4C higher than today, 10C warmer at the poles, and sea levels 5+ metres higher: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/what-does-400-ppm-look-like/ https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/wh...

vixin 12y ago

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/02/global-temperature-update-still-no-global-warming-for-17-years-10-months/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/02/global-temperature-upd... gives 'data from RSS dataset for the 214 months October 1996 to July 2014'. You can make your own projections: they are likely to be as accurate as any others taking into account the success rate of climate modellers.

graycat 12y ago
Many thanks for the link. Thanks, I needed that. So, the link has not only temperature data but the IPCC predictions. Terrific. I put the link where I can find it easily and won't lose it. I'd been hoping for just some such article. Terrific.
- bjz_ 12y ago
  WUWT is notorious for cherry picking data. Be very skeptical of their claims. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-19...
  - anthonyb 12y ago
    I don't think that's cherry picked; it looks like an outright fabrication to me. What are the odds that a line of regression on a graph like that would come out to exactly +0.00C?
    - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
      Out of a sufficiently noisy continuous dataset, you can actually do that quite easily simply by moving the start position until you hit exactly +0.00C. Which is what I suspect he did. If you move it forwards a few months, you get negatives until you leave that one anomalous spike out, and if you move it backwards, you start to get positives very quickly.
  - graycat 12y ago
    I didn't pay much attention to the fitted line. To take such a line seriously, need a lot of mathematical assumptions in practice nearly always impractical or impossible to get. I did pay attention to what I said, the temperature data and the IPCC projections. I was glad to see both. So, let's see: The link to skeptical science says that there is a lot of warming but it is in the oceans and that their work considering the 'energy' (i.e., temperature?) in the first 700 or 3000 meters shows that. And that warming is supposed to have been caused by warming of the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect of human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. So, we can't see the warming in the atmosphere, but somehow the atmosphere is supposed to be warming the oceans. Hmm. But, pursuing that point, or such points, of which there are many, to be productive needs much more in data, etc. than we have. Again, I was happy just seeing the basic temperature data and the IPCC predictions. That's better than pictures of polar bears and icebergs and claims that each hot period, cold period, wet period, dry period, change in wildlife population, blizzard, tornado, hurricane, etc. is evidence of 'climate change' caused by human use of CO2. For 'climate change theory', I like the one, "follow the money". I guess if I were running a news company with revenue from ads from eyeballs, then I'd take any excuse I could to write stories to get people up on their hind legs. Old standards were scandal from sinful, evil humans, danger, i.e., the sky is falling. Better yet is the sky is falling caused sinful/evil humans. Better yet is a 'theme' that each day can turn into yet another eyeball grabbing headline and news 'story'. So, I'd push 'global warming', oops, now 'climate change', too. And, I would have screamed about CFCs and the ozone and how happy I was to be ruining the air conditioners of millions of cars (including two of mine). I'd scream about anything I could, trash in the oceans, death of the oceans, death of the rain forests, loss of US farm land top soil, genetically modified crops, pictures of the arctic showing no ice (can get those in some areas, can vary from year to year, of the arctic during summers), etc. For the climate change story, I'd show pictures of clouds of water vapor from the cooling towers of nuke electric generating plants and hint that the clouds of water were dangerous CO2 from sinful/evil humans. For any smokestack putting out anything visible, I'd hint that it was CO2. I'd get quotes from Tom Friedman that CO2 absorbs sunlight (of course, that's false; CO2 absorbs in just three narrow bands, all out in the infrared). I'd push anything I could that would get eyeballs. It's a very old story: Claim that humans are sinful and/or evil. From that claim, a lot of churches long got a lot of revenue, and the old English morality plays got lots of eyeballs. A big theme in story telling is transgression from sinful/evil humans, retribution from an angry god, and finally redemption from sacrifice. So, for the transgression of sinful/evil humans and their emissions of CO2, the retribution is 'climate change', right, with lots of coastal cities flooding, coral reefs being bleached, the tropics converted to deserts, the northern temperate zone pushed to the arctic circle, nearly all fauna extinct, etc., and the redemption is sacrifice, e.g., give up cars, air conditioning, washing machines, return to walking or bicycles, grow own food, get electric power, catch as catch can, from wind and solar, etc. So, more news stories, lots each day, on each little part of this old trilogy. But, instead of such new blizzards of nonsense, I was happy to see the actual temperature record and the IPCC predictions. There's a thing about predictions: People can remember them. While the science for predicting temperature is from grimly difficult up to too difficult to do accurately now, we are quite good at measuring temperature, actual temperature in degrees K, C, or F. Then when there is a prediction of temperature, after a decade or so we get to compare the prediction and the measurements. The link I responded to lets us do that.
tonyedgecombe 12y ago
Cherry picking dates isn't helpful, 2010 was the hottest year on record followed by 2005.
anthonyb 12y ago
> "By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley" That would be Lord Christopher Monckton, notorious climate quack.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  But not a member of the House of Lords, though he frequently claims otherwise - http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/2011/letter-to-viscount-monckton-20110715.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/...

pdonis 12y ago

> how bad is it going to get? The only honest answer is, nobody knows. Which means that we should not be making plans based on the belief that we can predict what's going to happen; instead, we should be planning to be adaptable, so that we can deal with whatever happens.

machrider 12y ago
What does that even mean?
- pdonis 12y ago
  It means, for example, that we should not be emasculating the world's economy in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Instead, we should be concentrating on making the world's economy stronger, so that it will be easier and cheaper to cope with whatever happens to the climate in the future. If it gets warmer, we'll be able to deal; if it doesn't get warmer, we won't have made everybody poor.
  - tzs 12y ago
    You are making the assumption that there is no point beyond which we can no longer cope with the problem no matter how much money we throw at it. Can you justify that assumption?

rm999 12y ago

This wikipedia article point to some good sources on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_risk_from_global_warming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_risk_from_global_war... The tldr is that many scientists do believe that a significant % of species will go extinct at the current rate of global warming. But there is the standard uncertainty, as there always is in complex topics like this. >There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5 °C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5 °C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.

justin66 12y ago
> The tldr is that many scientists do believe that a significant % of species will go extinct at the current rate of global warming. A significant % of species ARE going extinct, today, under the current circumstances.

bjz_ 12y ago

So far we have been tracking the worst case scenario models. If feedback loops like the release of the methane stored in the arctic permafrost begin to run away from us, it could get pretty bad. We haven't seen most of the warming yet - most of it has been going into the oceans, but now they are reaching their capacity. The earth's climate is a complex system that is incredibly tricky to predict. But the more we know about it, the worse things seem to be. :( http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/06/new-video-reports-on-unstoppable-antarctic-glacial-melting/ http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/06/new-video-repo... http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/02/video-on-frozen-dirt-and-methane-we-cannot-go-there/ http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/02/video-on-froze...

spingsprong 12y ago
One factor that makes Methane not quite as bad as it could be, is it has an atmospheric half-life around 10% of CO2's So if a lot of Methane does get released into the atmosphere, in a couple of decades most of it will have broken down and disappeared.
- regularfry 12y ago
  That doesn't mean that the climate will return to where it was before the release. It could find a new stable point at a higher temperature than it is now due to changes in the Earth's albedo, among other things. Also, "disappeared": what it ends up breaking down into is carbon dioxide and water vapour, both greenhouse gases in their own right.
  - pja 12y ago
    But at least they're much less powerful greenhouse gases than methane itself (IIRC).
pdonis 12y ago
> most of it has been going into the oceans, but now they are reaching their capacity Huh? The oceans can absorb a lot more heat. If you run the numbers, the heat that's been added to the oceans in the last half century (according to the IPCC, whose numbers I'm not sure I believe because up until the Argo buoys started being deployed in the last ten years or so, the data was very sparse, but that's a separate question) has raised their temperature by about a tenth of a degree Celsius.

hrvbr 12y ago

Yes, the worst is mass extinction because the worst greenhouse-effect gas is water vapor. The risk with human-generated chemicals is that they bootstrap a transfer of ocean water into the atmosphere in a vicious circle: more heat => more evaporation => more heat. The Earth could become as hot as Venus. I don't think scientists have enough informations to tell if the Earth would have ways to stop this circle. Even if it did, the event would be bad for humans.

anthonyb 12y ago
Water vapour has a very short life cycle in the atmosphere, so while it's theoretically the worst, it's not actually particularly bad in the long term, and it's not likely to change by much. There's also some question as to the cooling effect of clouds. CO2 on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for quite a few years (30-95 according to wikipedia), so it's far worse in the long term.

anthonyb 12y ago

Yes, the worst case is pretty bad, both for us and life on earth. We're currently in the middle of a large extinction event, so the biosphere is probably pretty fragile even without the ongoing global warming. If it "helps", the last time CO2 levels were this high was in the middle of the Permian. 3-4C higher than today, 10C warmer at the poles, and sea levels 5+ metres higher: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/what-does-400-ppm-look-like/ https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/wh...