How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Mon Nov 06, 2017 4:42 pm

^^^ That's how science works, there is a lot of shonky scientific papers that get published, an hypothesis put forward in a paper is not immediately accepted as being correct, it needs to be rigorously validated by other scientists if it is to gain credibility in the science community..
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Blue » Tue Nov 07, 2017 2:41 pm

Syria Says It Will Join Paris Climate Agreement, Leaving Only U.S. on Outside


At a Glance
Syria announced it will commit to the Paris climate agreement during climate meetings in Germany.
This leaves the United States as the only nation in the world that isn't committed to the accord.
In June, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. will pull out of the accord as soon as possible.

Syria announced Tuesday that it will sign the Paris climate agreement, leaving the United States as the only country on the outside.

Confirmed by the New York Times, the Syrian delegate at the COP23 Climate Summit in Bonn, Germany, made the announcement that the country is ready to join the climate accord and send its commitment in writing to the United Nations. Last month, Nicaragua also committed to the agreement, leaving Syria and the U.S. as the only outliers at the time.

The climate accord was drawn up in 2015 with the goal of limiting global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which would require sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. Each nation has committed to realistic goals, with many developing nations allowed to set a more lenient goal, but all committed countries will be asked to cut carbon output.

Syria has not yet submitted its own goals, the Times also said.

(MORE: 5 Things to Know About the COP23 Climate Summit)

In a June 1 press conference at the White House, President Donald Trump ceremoniously announced the country would pull out of the climate accord as soon as they're allowed, which is not until November 2020.

Trump also said the U.S. is open to rejoining the accord if it can negotiate better terms. He believes the current agreement is bad for some U.S. industries, like coal and oil.

"As the president previously stated, the United States is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable for our country," White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said Tuesday in a statement obtained by the Times.

Experts believe global temperatures will still rise above that 2-degree threshold, even if the U.S. recommits to the climate accord, and that's one of the reasons world leaders have gathered in Bonn for meetings this week, according to Quartz.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Nov 08, 2017 3:09 pm

5 Scary Diseases Climate Change May Awaken from the Melting Permafrost
Each layer that melts exposes germs dating back thousands of years.
By Kali Holloway / AlterNet
November 7, 2017

If you are lacking in thoughts to keep you up at night, may I submit for your consideration the melting of the Arctic permafrost. The frozen subterranean soil in the Earth's polar regions accounts for about 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change, that great consequence of human arrogance, industry and tendency toward destruction, is causing that ice to melt at rates previously unseen. Studies show the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and a 2017 report from the Arctic Council suggests 20 percent of the uppermost layers of permafrost may melt by 2040. As the ice begins to thaw, each eroding layer will expose new layers, along with microbes that have been frozen away for thousands of years. That vast collection of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens may impact—or infect—our lives in ways that are best not to consider just before bed.

Here are five scary diseases climate change may expose to humanity.

1. Anthrax.

In 2016, an anthrax outbreak in Siberia killed a 12-year-old boy and more than 2,300 reindeer. More than 70 nomadic herders, among them over 40 children, were hospitalized during the health crisis, and at least seven other adults and children were diagnosed with the disease. The culprit? The carcass of an anthrax-infected reindeer who died of the infection way back in 1941.

A Siberian heat wave sent temperatures soaring as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit—exceptionally hot for the area—melting the permafrost that encased the corpse for decades and exposing spores of Bacillus anthracis into water, soil and ultimately, food supplies. The Guardian notes that “Thawing permafrost has also led to greater erosion of river banks where nomads often buried their dead” in shallow graves, because of the difficulty of digging deep beneath the ice.

“We literally fought for the life of each person, but the infection showed its cunning,” Dmitry Kobylkin, a governor in the region, told a local news outlet. “It returned after 75 years and took the life of a child.”

2. Previously unknown viruses.

Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel are microbiology professors who study viruses that attack amoebae. In a 30,000-year-old sample of Siberian permafrost, the scientists discovered two “giant viruses”—so named because of their comparatively enormous size to other viruses—Pithovirus sibericum andMollivirus sibericumcan. (The former, according to the World Economic Forum, is “more than 10 times larger than the HIV virus.”) Both viruses were still infectious. Though only amoebae are susceptible to the viruses, their discovery holds troubling implications for other contagions.

“We tried to isolate amoeba viruses without knowing they were going to be giant viruses—and a totally different type of virus than we already know appeared,” Claverie told the Atlantic. “It turns out the viruses we are getting [in the permafrost] are extremely abnormal, extremely fancy.”

“[T]he thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human or animal health,” the couple wrote in a study.

3. Diseases that had been previously eradicated.

Putting aside long-dormant new (or new to us) viruses, there’s also the issue of “zombie diseases” that have been safely tucked away in the ice for tens of thousands of years. These could very well include infections that have wreaked havoc on human populations in previous eras, including smallpox, various flu varieties, bubonic plague, and other deadly illnesses long since forgotten. Other infections that didn’t kill previous generations, but which we’ve lost immunity protection for, could also emerge.

In a 2011 paper foreshadowing the Siberian anthrax outbreak last year, researchers Boris A. Revich and Marina A. Podolnaya warned that “[a]s a consequence of permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th centuries may come back, especially near the cemeteries where the victims of these infections were buried.”

4. Whatever killed our now-extinct human ancestors.

“No one really understands why Neanderthals went extinct,” Jean-Michel Claverie told the Atlantic. In an interview with Vox, he explained, “We could actually catch a disease from a Neanderthal’s remains. Which is amazing.”

A BBC article notes that melting permafrost could potentially yield “viruses from long-extinct hominin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and were riddled with various viral diseases. Remains of Neanderthals from 30-40,000 years ago have been spotted in Russia. Human populations have lived there, sickened and died for thousands of years.”

5. Any of the scary things on this list.

Okay, not to be alarmist but oh my god someone sound the alarm, a lot of really frightening stuff might surface as warming continues and the ice exposes layers frozen to time. The BBC catalogs a few terrifying examples.

Scientists from the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk examined the corpse of a Stone Age man in the Siberian region of Gorny Altai, and other men who died in 19th century viral epidemics “and were buried in the permafrost region of Russia.” The BBC notes “they have found bodies with sores characteristic of the marks left by smallpox. While they did not find the smallpox virus itself, they have detected fragments of its DNA.”

The BBC story points out that “fragments of RNA from the 1918 Spanish flu virus” have been discovered by scientists “in corpses buried in mass graves in Alaska's tundra. Smallpox and the bubonic plague are also likely buried in Siberia.”

A bacterium that had been encased in an Antarctic glacier for 8 million years was successfully revived by a team of scientists laboring under the mistaken impression that we’re all hoping to star in a real-life version of "Stranger Things."

And in perhaps my favorite example of all, a group of NASA scientists revived bacteria dating back to the Pleistocene period. These Carnobacterium pleistocenium shared the era with mastodons, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Though the microbes had been immobilized in a chunk of ice for 32,000 years, they were in fine form after things warmed up.

“Once the ice melted,” according to the BBC “they began swimming around, seemingly unaffected.”
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:15 am

The most accurate climate change models predict the most alarming consequences, study finds

The climate change simulations that best capture current planetary conditions are also the ones that predict the most dire levels of human-driven warming, according to a statistical study released in the journal Nature Wednesday.

The study, by Patrick Brown and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., examined the high-powered climate change simulations, or “models,” that researchers use to project the future of the planet based on the physical equations that govern the behavior of the atmosphere and oceans.

The researchers then looked at what the models that best captured current conditions high in the atmosphere predicted was coming. Those models generally predicted a higher level of warming than models that did not capture these conditions as well.

The study adds to a growing body of bad news about how human activity is changing the planet’s climate and how dire those changes will be. But according to several outside scientists consulted by The Washington Post, while the research is well-executed and intriguing, it’s also not yet definitive.

“The study is interesting and concerning, but the details need more investigation,” said Ben Sanderson, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Brown and Caldeira are far from the first to study such models in a large group, but they did so with a twist.

In the past, it has been common to combine together the results of dozens of these models, and so give a range for how much the planet might warm for a given level of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. That’s the practice of the leading international climate science body, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Instead, Brown and Caldeira compared these models’ performance with recent satellite observations of the actual atmosphere and, in particular, of the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation that ultimately determines the Earth’s temperature. Then, they tried to determine which models performed better.

“We know enough about the climate system that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to throw all the models in a pool and say, we’re blind to which models might be good and which might be bad,” said Brown, a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution.

The research found the models that do the best job capturing the Earth’s actual “energy imbalance,” as the authors put it, are also the ones that simulate more warming in the planet’s future.

Under a high warming scenario in which large emissions continue throughout the century, the models as a whole give a mean warming of 4.3 degrees Celsius (or 7.74 degrees Fahrenheit), plus or minus 0.7 degrees Celsius, for the period between 2081 and 2100, the study noted. But the best models, according to this test, gave an answer of 4.8 degrees Celsius (8.64 degrees Fahrenheit), plus or minus 0.4 degrees Celsius.

Overall, the change amounted to bumping up the projected warming by about 15 percent. The researchers presented this figure to capture the findings:

When it comes down to the question of why the finding emerged, it appears that much of the result had to do with the way different models handled one of the biggest uncertainties in how the planet will respond to climate change.

“This is really about the clouds,” said Michael Winton, a leader in the climate model development team at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who discussed the study with The Post but was not involved in the research.

Clouds play a crucial role in the climate because among other roles, their light surfaces reflect incoming solar radiation back out to space. So if clouds change under global warming, that will in turn change the overall climate response.

How clouds might change is quite complex, however, and as the models are unable to fully capture this behavior due to the small scale on which it occurs, the programs instead tend to include statistically based assumptions about the behavior of clouds. This is called “parameterization.”

But researchers aren’t very confident that the parameterizations are right. “So what you’re looking at is, the behavior of what I would say is the weak link in the model,” Winton said.

This is where the Brown and Caldeira study comes in, basically identifying models that, by virtue of this programming or other factors, seem to do a better job of representing the current behavior of clouds. However, Winton and two other scientists consulted by The Post all said that they respected the study’s attempt, but weren’t fully convinced.

Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was concerned that the current study might find an effect that wasn’t actually there, in part because models are not fully independent of one another — they tend to overlap in many areas.

“This approach is designed to find relationships between future temperatures and things we can observe today,” he said. “The problem is we don’t have enough models to be confident that the relationships are robust. The fact that models from different institutions share components makes this problem worse, and the authors haven’t really addressed this fully.”

“It’s great that people are doing this well and we should continue to do this kind of work — it’s an important complement to assessments of sensitivity from other methods,” added Gavin Schmidt, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But we should always remember that it’s the consilience of evidence in such a complex area that usually gives you robust predictions.”

Schmidt noted future models might make this current finding disappear — and also noted the increase in warming in the better models found in the study was relatively small.

Lead study author Brown argued, though, that the results have a major real world implication: They could mean the world can emit even less carbon dioxide than we thought if it wants to hold warming below the widely accepted target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This would mean shrinking the “carbon budget.”

The study “would imply that to stabilize temperature at 2 degrees Celsius, you’d have to have 15 percent less cumulative CO2 emissions,” he said.

The world can ill afford that — as it is, it is very hard to see how even the current carbon budget can be met. The world is generally regarded as being off track when it comes to cutting its emissions, and with continuing economic growth, the challenge is enormous.

In this sense, that the new research will have to win acceptance may be at least a temporary reprieve for policymakers, who would be in a tough position indeed if it were shown to be definitively right.


Pictures and stuff at link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... 259650d238
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby SonicG » Thu Dec 07, 2017 1:43 am

Now SoCal is burning. Totally subjective data point but strong Santa Ana winds in Dec. seems quite odd to me (I grew up in San Diego)...

See incredible images from the wildfire raging near famed Getty Center in Los Angeles
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 926454001/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:19 am

It reached 81 in Denver on November 27th. Um, "unheard of" to say the least, but Denver has always been like that -- but not quite like this year. It seems like nobody's saying shit about the inordinately very warm weather other than, "don't worry skiers, snow will come eventually." But, no mention on the dangers of low snow pack for fires or the Colorado River drying up and what that means downstream this summer. Probably because it's happening smack dab in the supposed to be bustling holiday vacation season. So keep calm and carry on with the pissed away marketing expense and express wonder at what the hell is going on later.

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/27/de ... at-record/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Dec 08, 2017 8:08 pm

Iam posted a short excerpt and a link to this story earlier, but it bears repeating in full:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... _source=tw

Annotated version here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... tated.html

The Uninhabitable Earth

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
By David Wallace-Wells

I. ‘Doomsday’
Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines). Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”

But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.*

The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.

Over the past few decades, the term “Anthropocene” has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination — a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical “dominion”). And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.

II. Heat Death
The bahraining of New York.

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.

Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.

It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.

III. The End of Food
Praying for cornfields in the tundra.

Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.

Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.

Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.

Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.

IV. Climate Plagues
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?

Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them — the 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million–year–old one a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity — to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.

What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.

As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second worrying effect — disease mutation. One reason you hadn’t heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda; another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects. Scientists still don’t entirely understand what happened, or what they missed. But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.

V. Unbreathable Air
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.

Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season (in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according to the U.S. Forest Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires — which would not only expel enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen.

Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.

VI. Perpetual War
The violence baked into heat.

Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.

This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.

What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

VII. Permanent Economic Collapse
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.

The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.
But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.

The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor).
Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.

The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd business calculation.
Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

VIII. Poisoned Oceans
Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.

That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.

But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more than a third of the world’s carbon is sucked up by the oceans — thank God, or else we’d have that much more warming already. But the result is what’s called “ocean acidification,” which, on its own, may add a half a degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the planet’s water basins — you may remember these as the place where life arose in the first place. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching” — that is, coral dying — which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.

That isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.” The name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but today it’s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt — it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.

IX. The Great Filter
Our present eeriness cannot last.

So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.

Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about “deep time” — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.

It is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.

Or the scientists’. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture — untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several trillion dollars — and various forms of “geoengineering,” the catchall name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares, from science fiction. He is especially focused on what’s called the aerosol approach — dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun’s rays, buying the planet at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. “Of course, that would make our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,” he says. “But you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got to watch that you don’t say the giant problem shouldn’t be solved because the solution causes some smaller problems.” He won’t be around to see that, he told me. “But in your lifetime …”

Jim Hansen is another member of this godfather generation. Born in 1941, he became a climatologist at the University of Iowa, developed the groundbreaking “Zero Model” for projecting climate change, and later became the head of climate research at NASA, only to leave under pressure when, while still a federal employee, he filed a lawsuit against the federal government charging inaction on warming (along the way he got arrested a few times for protesting, too). The lawsuit, which is brought by a collective called Our Children’s Trust and is often described as “kids versus climate change,” is built on an appeal to the equal-protection clause, namely, that in failing to take action on warming, the government is violating it by imposing massive costs on future generations; it is scheduled to be heard this winter in Oregon district court. Hansen has recently given up on solving the climate problem with a carbon tax alone, which had been his preferred approach, and has set about calculating the total cost of the additional measure of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.

Hansen began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere enveloped in an unbreathable gas; he switched to studying our planet by 30, wondering why he should be squinting across the solar system to explore rapid environmental change when he could see it all around him on the planet he was standing on. “When we wrote our first paper on this, in 1981,” he told me, “I remember saying to one of my co-authors, ‘This is going to be very interesting. Sometime during our careers, we’re going to see these things beginning to happen.’ ”

Several of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the “Great Filter”: “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” he told me. “If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we’ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.

And yet, improbably, Ward is an optimist. So are Broecker and Hansen and many of the other scientists I spoke to. We have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation. But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.

It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Dec 08, 2017 8:12 pm

Peter Watts' take on things, including people's reactions to the above story (hint: it's not optimistic):

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7809

Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction

I recently read Terri Favro’s upcoming book on the history and future of robotics, sent to me by a publisher hungry for blurbs. It’s a fun read— I had no trouble obliging them— but I couldn’t avoid an almost oppressive sense of— well, of optimism hanging over the whole thing. Favro states outright, for example, that she’s decided to love the Internet of Things; those who eye it with suspicion she compares to old fogies who stick with their clunky coal-burning furnace and knob-and-tube wiring as the rest of the world moves into a bright sunny future. She praises algorithms that analyze your behavior and autonomously order retail goods on your behalf, just in case you’re not consuming enough on your own: “We’ll be giving up our privacy, but gaining the surprise and delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door” she gushes (sliding past the surprise and delight we’ll feel when our Visa bill loads up with purchases we never made). “How many of us can resist the lure of the new?” Favro does pay lip service to the potential hackability of this Internet of Things— concedes that her networked fridge might be compromised, for example— but goes on to say “…to do what, exactly? Replace my lactose-free low-fat milk with table cream? Sabotage my diet by substituting chocolate for rapini?”

Maybe, yeah. Or maybe your insurance company might come snooping around in the hopes your eating habits might give them an excuse to reject that claim for medical treatments you might have avoided if you’d “lived more responsibly”. Maybe some botnet will talk your fridge and a million others into cranking up their internal temperatures to 20ºC during the day, then bringing them all back down to a nice innocuous 5º just before you get home from work. (Salmonella in just a few percent of those affected could overwhelm hospitals and take out our medical response capacity overnight.) And while Favro at least admits to the danger of Evil Russian Hackers, she never once mentions that our own governments will in all likelihood be rooting around in our fridges and TVs and smart bulbs, cruising the Internet Of Things while whistling that perennial favorite If You Got Nothin’ to Hide You Got Nothin’ to Fear…

Nor should we forget that old chestnut from Blue Lives Murder: “I had to shoot him, Your Honor. I feared for my life. It’s true the suspect was unarmed at the time, but he’s well over six feet tall and according to his Samsung Health app he lifted weights and ran 20K three times a week…”

That’s just a few ways your wired appliances can hurt you personally. We haven’t scratched the potential damage to wider targets. What’s to stop them from getting conscripted into an appliance-based botnet like, for example, the one that took out KrebsOnSecurity last year?

I’m not trying to shit on Favro; as I said, I enjoyed the book. But it did get me thinking about bigger pictures, and this recent demand for brighter prognoses. These days it seems as if everyone and their dog is demanding we stick our fingers in our ears, squeeze our eyes tight shut, and whistle a happy tune while the mountainside collapses on top of us.

In a sense this is nothing new. Denial is a ubiquitous part of human nature. One of the things science fiction has traditionally done has been get in our faces, hold our eyelids open and force us to look at the road ahead. That’s a big reason I was drawn to the field in the first place.

So how come some of the most strident demands to Lighten the Hell Up are coming from inside science fiction itself?

*

It started slow. Remember back at the beginning of the decade, when the president of Arizona State University told Neal Stephenson that the sorry state of the space program was our fault? Science fiction wasn’t bold and optimistic like it used to be, apparently. It had stopped Dreaming Big. The rocket scientists weren’t inspired because we weren’t being sufficiently inspirational.

I’ve always found that argument a bit tenuous, but Stephenson took it to heart. Booted up “Project Hieroglyph“, a big shiny movement devoted to chasing dystopia down into the cellar and replacing it with upbeat, optimistic science fiction that could Change The World. The fruit of that labor was Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future; a number of my friends can be found within its pages, although for some reason I was not approached for a contribution. (No problem— I got my shot just this year when Kathryn Cramer, the coeditor of H:SaVfaBF, let me write my own piece of optiskif for the X-Prize’s Seat 14C.)

A few grumbled (Ramez Naam struck back in Slate in defense of dystopias). Others dug in their heels: You don’t need to squint very hard to figure out Michal Solana’s take-home message in “Stop Writing Dystopian Fiction – It’s Making Us All Fear Technology“. That appeared in Wired back in 2014, but the bandwagon rolls on still. Just this year, writing in Clarkesworld, my dear friend Kelly Robson put her foot down: “No more dystopias [italics hers]. What we need is near- and mid-future stories that show an array of trajectories out of the gloomy toilet bowl we’re spiraling.”

There’s something telling about that edict, insofar as it explicitly admits that yes, we are indeed circling the drain. We’re all on that same page, at least. But what the hope police[1] seem to be converging on is, You don’t get to give us bad news unless you can also tell us how to make it good. Don’t you dare deliver a diagnosis of cancer unless you’ve got a cure stashed up your sleeve, because otherwise you’re just being a downer.

Looks like dangerous seas up ahead. I know! Let’s erase all the reefs from our nautical charts![2]

*

Inherent in this attitude is the belief that science fiction matters, that it can influence the trajectory of real life, that We Have The Power To Change the Future and With Great Power Goes Great Responsibility— so if we serve up an unending diet of crushing dystopias people will lose all hope, melt into whimpering puddles of flop sweat, and grow too paralyzed to fix anything. Because the World takes us so very seriously. Because if we do not tell tales of hope, then we have no one to blame but ourselves when the ceiling crashes in.

I’ve always been a bit gobsmacked by the arrogance of that view.

I’m not saying that SF has never proven inspirational in real life. NASA is infested with scientists and engineers who were weaned on Star Trek. Gibson informed the future as much as he imagined it. Hell, we wouldn’t have the glorious legacy of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative if a bunch of Real SF Writers hadn’t snuck into the White House and inspired the Gipper with hi-tech tales of space-based missile shields and ion cannons. I’m not denying any of that.

What I’m saying is that none of those things inspired people to change. It merely justified their inclination to keep on doing what they’d always wanted to. Science fiction is like the Bible that way: it’s big enough, and messy enough, to let you cherry-pick “inspiration” for pretty much any paradigm that turns your crank. Hell, you can even use SF to justify a society based on incest (check out the works of Theodore Sturgeon if you don’t believe me). That’s one of the reasons I like the genre; you can go anywhere.

You want to convince me that SF can change the world? Show me the timeline where we headed off overpopulation because people read Stand on Zanzibar. Show me a world where the existence of Nineteen Eighty-Four prevented the US and Britain from routinely surveilling their citizens. Show me a place where ‘Murrica read The Handmaid’s Tale and whispered in horrified tones: “Holy shit, we really gotta dial back our religious fundamentalism.”

It’s no accomplishment to inspire people to do things they already want to. You want to lay claim to being part of Team Worldchanger, show me a time when you inspired people to do something they didn’t want to. Show me a time you changed society’s mind.

Ray Bradbury tried to imagine such a world, once— late in his career when he’d gone soft, when hard-edged masterpieces like “Skeleton” and “The Small Assassin” were lost to history and all he had left in him were mushy stories about Laurel and Hardy, or time-travelers who used their technology to go back and make Herman Melville feel better about his writing career. This particular story was called “The Toynbee Convector”, and it was about a guy who saved the world by lying to it. He told everyone that he’d built a time machine, gone into the Future, and seen that It Was Good: we’d cleaned up the planet, saved the whales, eliminated poverty and overpopulation. And in this upbeat science fiction story, people didn’t say Great: well, since we know everything’s gonna be okay anyhow, we might as well keep sitting on our asses, snarfing pork rinds until Utopia comes calling. No, they rolled up their sleeves, and by golly they set about making that future happen. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a story more willfully blind to Human Nature.

If you’re looking for ways in which science fiction can inspire, here’s something the hope police may have forgotten to mention: if downbeat stories inspire despair and paralysis, it’s at least as likely that upbeat stories inspire complacency. Yeah, I know the planet’s warming and the icecaps are melting and we’re wiping out sixty species a day, but I’m sure we’ll muddle through somehow. We’re a resourceful species when the chips are down. Someone will come up with something. I read it in a book by Kim Stanley Robinson.

*

In fact, Kim Stanley Robinson is a good example. He’s no misty-eyed Utopian by any stretch, but he’s certainly more hopeful in his imaginings than the Atwoods and Brunners of the world. He recently pointed to the Paris Agreement as a “hopeful sign“:

It was a historical moment that will go down in any competent world history … That moment when the United Nation member states said, “We have to put a price on carbon. We have to go beyond capitalism and regulate our entire economy and our technological base in order to keep the planet alive.”

Surely I can’t be the only one who sees the oxymoron in “put a price on carbon … go beyond capitalism”. The moment you affix a monetary value to carbon you’re subsuming it into capitalism. You’re turning it into just another commodity to be bought and sold.

Granted, this is better than pretending it doesn’t exist (I believe “externalities” is the term economists use when they want to ignore something completely). And Robinson is no fan of conventional economics: he dismissed the field as “pseudoscience” at Readercon a few years back, which was heartening even if it is so obvious you shouldn’t have to keep coming out and saying it. But the moment you put a price on carbon, it’s only a matter of time before some asshole shows up with a checkbook and says “OK— here’s your price, paid in full. Now fuck off while I continue to destroy the world in time for the next quarterly report.” Putting a price on carbon is the exact opposite of moving beyond capitalism; it’s extending capitalism into new and more dangerous realms.

Citing such developments as positive makes me a bit queasy.

I got the same kind of feeling when everyone dog-piled all over David Wallace-Wells “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York Magazine this past summer. Wallace-Wells’ bottom line was that even the bad news you’ve heard about climate change is a soft-sell, that things are even worse than the experts are admitting, that in all likelihood large parts of the planet will be uninhabitable for humans by the end of this century.

It took about three hours for the yay-sayers to start weighing in, tearing down that gloomy-Gus perspective. They tried to pick holes in the science, although ultimately they had to admit that there weren’t many. The main complaint was that Wallace-Wells always assumes the worst-case scenario— and really, things probably won’t get that bad. Even Michel Mann, one of Climate Change’s biggest rock stars, weighed in: “There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.” This turned out to be the most common criticism: not that the article was necessarily wrong overall, but that it was just too depressing, too defeatist. Have to give people hope, you know. Have to stop being all doom-and-gloom and start inspiring instead.

I have a few problems with this. First: Sorry, but when you’re driving for the edge of a cliff with your foot literally on the gas, I don’t think “inspiration” is what we should be going for. We should be going for sheer pants-pissing terror at the prospect of what happens when we go over that cliff. I humbly suggest that that might prove a better motivator.

Further, describing the worst-case scenario isn’t unreasonable when the observed data keep converging on something even worse. Science, by nature, is conservative; a result isn’t even considered statistically significant below a probability of at least 95%, often 99%. Global systems are full of complexity and noise, things that degrade statistical significance even in the presence of real effects— so scientific publications, almost by definition, tend to understate risk.

Which might explain why, once we were finally able to collect field data to weigh against decades of computer projections, the best news was that observed CO2 emissions were only tracking the predicted worst-case scenario. Ice-cap melting and sea-level rise were worse than the predicted worst-case— and from what I can tell this is pretty typical. (I’ve been checking in on the relevant papers in Science and Nature since before the turn of the century, and I can remember maybe two papers in all that time that said Hey, this variable actually isn’t as bad as we thought!)

So saying that Wallace-Wells takes the worst-case scenario isn’t a criticism. It’s an endorsement. If anything, the man understates our predicament. Which made it a bit troubling to see even Ramez Naam— defender of dystopian fiction— weighing in against the New York piece. Calling it “bleak” and “misleading”, he accused Wallace-Wells of “underestimat[ing] Human ingenuity” and “exaggerat[ing] impacts”. He spoke of trend lines for anticipated temperature rise bending down, not up— and of course, he lamented the hopeless tone of the article which would, he felt, make it psychologically harder to take action.

I’m not sure where Ramez got his trend data— it doesn’t seem entirely consistent with what those Copenhagen folks had to say a few years back— but even if he’s right, it’s a little like saying Yes, we may be a hundred meters away from running into that iceberg, but over the past couple of hours we’ve actually managed to change course by three whole degrees! Progress! At this rate we’ll be able to miss the iceberg entirely in just another three or four kilometers!

*

I don’t mean to pick on Ramez, any more than on Favro— having recently hung out with him, I can attest that he is one smart and awesome dude. But. Try this scenario on for size:

You’re in your living room, watching Netflix. You look out the window and see a great honking boulder plunging down the hill, mere seconds from smashing your home to kindling. Do you:

1. Crumple into a ball of weeping despair and wait for the end;
2. Keep watching Stranger Things because that boulder is just a Chinese hoax;
3. Wait for someone to inspire you to action with tales of a hopeful future; or
4. Run like hell, even though it means abandoning your giant flatscreen TV?

This underscores, I believe, a potential flaw in the worldview of the hope police. It may be that despair and hopelessness reduce us into inaction— but it may also be true that we simply aren’t scared enough. You can thank our old friend Hyperbolic Discounting for that: the future is never all that real to us, not down in the gut where we set our priorities. Catastrophe in ten years is less real than discomfort today. So we put off the necessary steps. We slide towards apocalypse because we can’t be bothered to get off the couch. The problem is not that we are paralyzed with despair; the problem, more likely, is that we haven’t really internalized what’s in store for us. The problem is that our species is already delusionally optimistic by nature.

Not all of us, mind you. Some folks perceive their contextual status with relative accuracy: they’re better than the rest of us at figuring out how much control they really have over local events, for example. They’re better at assessing their own performance at assigned tasks. Most of us tend to take credit for the good things that happen to us, while blaming something else for the bad. But some folks, faced with the same scenarios, apportion blame and credit without that self-serving bias.

We call these people “clinically depressed”. We regard them as a bunch of unmotivated Debbie Downers who always look on the dark side— even though their worldview is empirically more accurate than the self-serving ego-boosts the rest of us experience.

Judged on that basis, chances are that even most dystopias are too optimistic. Telling us that we need to be more optimistic is like telling an already-drunk driver to have another mickey for the road. More hope and sunshine may be the last thing we need; just maybe, what we need is to catch sight of that boulder crashing down the hill, and to believe it. Maybe that might be enough to get us moving.

*

The distribution isn’t a clean bimodal. Sure, there’s a clump of us here at the Grim Dystopia end of the scale, and another clump way over there at the Power of Positive Thinking. But there’s this other place between those poles, a place that mixes light and dark. A place whose citizens say You may not like it but it’s gonna happen anyway, so why not just settle back and enjoy the ride?

I see it when Terri Favro waves away the implications of smart homes that drain our savings into the coffers of retailers we never met in exchange for products we never asked for, with a shrug and a cheery “How many of us can resist the lure of the new?” I see it when I read articles in Wired that rail against our ongoing loss of privacy, only to finally admit “We are not going to retreat from the cloud… We live there now.” Or that more recent piece— just a couple of months back— which begins with ominous descriptions of China’s truly pernicious Social Scoring program, segues into it’s-not-all-bad Territory (Hey, at least it’s more transparent than our own No-Fly Lists), and finishes off with the not-so-subtle implication that it’ll probably happen here too before long, so we might as well get used to it.

It’s almost as though some Invisible Hand were drawing us in by expressing our worst fears, validating them to engender trust— and then gently herding us toward passive acceptance of the inevitable. “We’ll be giving up our privacy, but gaining the surprise and delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door!” Can’t ask for more than that.

Not unless you want to end up on the wrong kind of list, anyway.

*

These aren’t huge leaps. Inspiration Not Despair segues into Look on the Bright Side which circles ever closer to Accept and Acquiesce. There are, after all, a lot of interests who don’t want us to believe in that boulder crashing down the hill— and if said boulder becomes ever-harder to deny, then at least they can try to convince us that it really isn’t so bad, that we’ll learn to like the boulder even if ends up squashing a few things we used to value. There’s always a bright side. The planet may be warming, but it’s not warming as fast! Just another few kilometers and we’ll be past that iceberg! See, we’ve even put a price on carbon!

Of course, if you really need to blame someone, look no further than those naysayers over in the corner; they’re the ones who didn’t Dream Big. They’re the ones who failed to Inspire the rest of us. Don’t blame us when the boulder squashes you flat; blame them, for “making us all fear technology”. Blame them, for failing to “show an array of trajectories out of the gloomy toilet bowl we’re spiraling”.

In fact, why wait until the boulder actually hits?

Blame them now, and avoid the rush.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Jan 25, 2018 5:18 pm

Is There A Ticking Time Bomb Under The Arctic?


January 24, 2018 4:37 AM ET

A short drive north of Fairbanks, Alaska, there's a red shed stuck right up against a hillside. The shed looks unremarkable, except for the door. It looks like a door to a walk-in freezer, with thick insulation and a heavy latch. Whatever is behind that door needs to stay very cold.

"Are you ready to go inside?" asks Dr. Thomas Douglas, a geochemist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Behind the door is a geological time bomb, scientists say. No one knows exactly how big the bomb is. It may even be a dud that barely detonates. But the fallout could be so large that it's felt all around the world. Now there's evidence that, in the past few years, the bomb's timer has started ticking.

Douglas opens the shed door, and we step inside. Immediately, we're standing 40 feet below ground, inside a tunnel carved into the hillside.

"That's a mammoth leg right there," Douglas says as he points to a giant femur protruding from the tunnel wall.

All around are signs of extinct creatures. Tusks poke out of the ceiling and skulls stick up from the floor. But it's the material between the bones that interests Douglas the most: the permafrost.

In the 1960s, the Army dug the tunnel so it could study this unique surface, which covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. In some places, the frozen soil extends downward more than 1,000 feet, or about the height of the Empire State Building.

Technically, permafrost is frozen soil. But it's helpful to think of it in terms of chocolate cake. Typically, cake is soft, moist and spongy. Now if you take that cake, dip it into water and freeze it, the cake becomes hard or stiff. That's exactly what happens to soil when you freeze it: Moist, soft soil turns hard and stiff. That's permafrost.

For the first time in centuries, the Arctic permafrost is beginning to change — rapidly. It's warming up. Some places are softening like a stick of butter left out on the kitchen counter.

In northern Alaska, the temperature at some permafrost sites has risen by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1980s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in November. And in recent years, many spots have reached record temperatures.

"Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades," NOAA wrote in its annual Arctic Report Card last year.

The consequences of this warming could have ripple effects around the world. To explain why, Douglas takes me deeper down into the tunnel.

"This is really an amazing feature," he says, shining his flashlight up to the ceiling. Crispy grass is dangling upside-down above our heads.

"It's green grass — from 25,000 years ago," he exclaims. "It has been preserved that way for 25,000 years."

The permafrost is packed with the remains of ancient life. From prehistoric grass and trees to woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, just about every creature that lived on the tundra over the past 100,000 years is buried and preserved down in the permafrost.

And all this life is made of carbon. So there's a massive amount of carbon buried down here. "The permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is currently in Earth's atmosphere," Douglas says. "That's 1,600 billion metric tons."

In fact, there's more carbon in the permafrost, Douglas says, than all the carbon humans have spewed into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — first with steam trains, then with coal plants, cars and planes.

Right now the permafrost carbon is inert and trapped in the frozen soil. But what happens when the soil thaws? That's the question Douglas and his colleagues are trying to figure out.

A few years ago, they ran a simple experiment. They brought big drills into the tunnel and cut out chunks of ice. "We collected pieces about the size of Coca-Cola cans," he says, as he points out holes in the tunnel's wall.

They took the ice back to the lab and let it slowly come up to room temperature. Then they looked for signs of life. A few days later, something started growing — slowly at first, but then like gangbusters.

"This is material that stayed frozen for 25,000 years," Douglas says. "And given the right environmental conditions, it came back alive again vigorously."

They were ancient bacteria. And once they warmed up, they were hungry. The bacteria started converting the carbon that's in dead plants and animals into gases that cause climate change: carbon dioxide and methane.

That experiment was in the lab. But imagine these bacteria waking up, all around the Arctic, across Canada, Greenland and Russia. Last year, scientists started seeing signs of this happening in northern Alaska.

"We have evidence that Alaska has changed from being a net absorber of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to a net exporter of the gas back to the atmosphere," says Charles Miller, a chemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who measures gas emissions from Arctic permafrost.

Scientists don't know yet how much carbon will get released from thawing permafrost or how fast it will happen. Some of the carbon — maybe a big percentage of it — will get washed into the ocean by erosion. Some of the carbon will also get sucked back into the ground by new trees and plants popping up across the warming tundra.

But once carbon begins to percolate up through the thawing soil, it could form a feedback loop "over which we would have zero control," Miller says. The gas, coming from the ground, warms the Earth, which in turn causes more gas to be released and more warming to occur.

Thawing permafrost is a big wild card of climate change.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Feb 08, 2018 7:25 pm

Volume 96 Issue 7 | p. 6 | News of The Week
Issue Date: February 12, 2018 | Web Date: February 8, 2018

Permafrost thaw could spike global mercury, study suggests
New assessment adds a million tons to estimates of mercury in soil

By Sam Lemonick

Image
Melting permafrost in Alaska. Credit: Flickr.com/NPS Climate Change Response

Northern hemisphere permafrost holds at least as much, if not more, mercury than all the rest of the world’s soil, a new study finds. If the frozen soil layer, typically found at higher latitudes, thaws as climate scientists predict, global mercury levels could rise dramatically by 2100 (Geophys. Rev. Lett. 2018, DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075571).

When elemental mercury emitted by volcanoes, smokestacks, and other natural and anthropogenic sources lands on the ground, it bonds to organic matter in the soil, according to Paul Schuster of the U.S. Geological Survey, who led the study. Microbes can degrade that organic matter and release mercury back into the atmosphere and waterways, but in frozen soil, that process stops. Over time, sedimentation traps mercury deeper and deeper in permafrost. Now climate scientists estimate the Northern Hemisphere could lose between 30% and 99% of its permafrost by 2100.

To understand what that might mean for global mercury levels, Schuster and his colleagues drilled and analyzed sediment cores from 13 sites in Alaska. Based on the concentrations of mercury they found in the permafrost and the soil above it, they calculated that areas with the frozen layer hold about 1.7 million metric tons of mercury, with half of that in the permafrost itself. On the basis of nine previous estimates, the average global soil mercury level was thought to be about 450,000 metric tons, according to the researchers. Mercury itself does not pose a large danger to humans. It becomes most toxic in water-soluble forms such as methylmercury.

Schuster predicts that mercury from thawing permafrost could eventually end up in oceans and waterways, where it would increase baseline mercury levels and could affect fisheries. Thomas Douglas, a chemist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says the important next step for researchers is to understand how—and how much—mercury will move through ecosystems as permafrost thaws.

The research could change the way scientists think about soil mercury, according to Elsie Sunderland, an environmental scientist at Harvard University. “In the past, when we thought about the amounts of mercury in soils, we were focused on the fractions that are most likely to be mobilized to the atmosphere or oceans. Permafrost wasn’t really on the horizon,” she says. “That’s really changing.”

Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2018 American Chemical Society


https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i7/Permafrost-thaw-spike-global-mercury.html
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Feb 12, 2018 7:24 pm

Sea Levels Are Surging at Faster and Faster Rates as Antarctica and Greenland Melt, Satellite Data Reveals
By Sydney Pereira On 2/12/18 at 3:18 PM

Sea levels aren’t just steadily rising—they’re accelerating, according to a new assessment based on 25 years of satellite data. The findings, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirm what climate projections have already told us. The results reveal that sea level rise has been accelerating for the past 25 years, rather than steadily rising the same amount each year.

Assuming the acceleration rate stays the same, which the lead author said is unlikely, sea levels will surge 26 inches by 2100 from climate change alone.

Scientists used satellite data to pinpoint acceleration of sea level rise over 25 years, beginning in 1993. A second part of the study used satellite data tracking tiny fluctuations in gravity due to ice mass loss to trace the acceleration back to melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. “This study would not have been possible without satellite measurements,” Steve Nerem, lead author and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder, told Newsweek. “They really are our kind of eye on the Earth.”

These so-called eyes on the Earth revealed that sea level rise is not steadily rising at 0.1 inch every year, but rather, that increase is increasing, itself—by 0.003 inches each year. Though these numbers sound small, tiny increases across the globe over several decades can result in devastating consequences from sea level rise on coastal cities alone. Storm surges and salt water intrusion into aquifers where some communities get their drinking water are just two examples.

Assuming the acceleration rate that this study found stays consistent throughout the century, sea levels will rise 26 inches by 2100, the authors concluded. But, that number “is almost certainly a conservative estimate of future sea level change,” Nerem said. “The acceleration will probably go up as ice sheets start to respond more to the warming.”

Another caveat: this assessment did not account for sea level changes from other factors, including the climate phenomena known as El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which affects ocean temperatures and precipitation, and the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. (Volcanic eruptions have a mild cooling effect that can, in turn, affect sea levels). Disentangling the various causes of sea level changes allowed researchers to pinpoint the acceleration rate due to climate change alone, which is critical to illuminate what sea level changes will happen over a time period of several decades.

"We have known from observations that the ice sheets and mountain glaciers have been losing mass at an accelerated rate over the past decade or so," Fernando Paolo, postdoctoral scholar at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was not involved with the study, told Newsweek. This study shows "a clear acceleration in the 25-year sea level rise, which can be linked to the accelerated ice loss."

The 26-inch sea level rise by 2100 is similar to model projections based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report. That assessment, which Nerem said some describe as a conservative estimate, has been organized by the United Nations since 1988. Model projections include various factors of Earth and ice physics, accounting for nearly everything that may affect climate or sea levels, according to Nerem.

“[Our study] is much more simplistic, but it’s kind of providing a check on those model projections,” he explained. The acceleration rate uncovered in this study would more than double sea level rise by 2100 in comparison to steady sea level rise without acceleration.

Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are the main cause of sea level rise and this acceleration, according to the study. Nerem said: “The big question in sea level science today is how are the ice sheets going to respond to the warming, and how quickly.”
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Feb 13, 2018 7:44 pm

Will Pacific Island Nations Disappear as Seas Rise? Maybe Not. Reef islands can grow and change shape as sediments shift, studies show.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150213-tuvalu-sopoaga-kench-kiribati-maldives-cyclone-marshall-islands/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Blue » Fri Mar 16, 2018 4:18 pm

5 reasons the Arctic’s extremely warm winter should alarm you

Cape Morris Jesup in Greenland is just about the northernmost piece of land on planet Earth. It’s located just 400 miles south of the North Pole, on Greenland’s craggy, desolate north shore. This is a place so far north that the sun doesn’t rise for most of the winter months.

In February, in the dark of winter, Cape Morris Jesup’s weather station recorded nearly 60 hours of temperatures above freezing — a new record. On February 24, the temperature reached a high of 43 degrees Fahrenheit.

Think of it like this: On February 24, you could be standing on the northernmost bit of land in the entire world, in darkness, in shorts and a T-shirt. That you wouldn’t quickly die is astounding because the cape’s temperatures are usually closer to minus 30 degrees in February.

It’s often said that on this warming planet, nowhere is changing faster than the Arctic. But this winter is providing stunning new evidence of a region in extraordinary, worrying flux. It’s also a hint of the future to come: an Arctic Ocean that’s not permanently frozen and all the disastrous consequences that come with that.

1) It was the warmest Arctic winter on record
Overall, this winter (as measured by December, January, and February, the three coldest months) was the warmest on record. As the Associated Press reported, Arctic weather stations averaged 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

These Arctic warm spells do occur due to natural variability, Alek Petty, a NASA polar scientist, says. “But the key is that they are happening more frequently, they are lasting longer, and they have been more intense than they used to be,” he says. Indeed, this was the third Arctic winter in a row that experienced an extreme heat wave.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/15/17099686/arctic-warm-winter-sea-ice-melting-facts
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