How Bad Is Global Warming?

[Luther Blissett]

A 1ºC above average ocean temperature in 2014 is pretty huge, isn't it?

From the chart below, what are the odds that atmospheric aerosol loading, novel entities, and functional diversity are all at safe levels?

I have been wanting to create some interactive information graphics on positive feedback loops.

Life on Earth now officially at risk, scientists say
By Oliver Milman on 16 Jan 2015

Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases, and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found.

Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.

Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels — human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change, and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer use.

Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.

They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilization has advanced significantly.

Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.



Since 1950, urban populations have increased sevenfold, primary energy use has soared by a factor of five, while the amount of fertilizer used is now eight times higher. The amount of nitrogen entering the oceans has quadrupled.

All of these changes are shifting Earth into a “new state” that is becoming less hospitable to human life, researchers said.

“These indicators have shot up since 1950 and there are no signs they are slowing down,” said professor Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center. Steffen is the lead author on both of the studies.

“When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution. It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to human activity, not natural variability.”

Steffen said direct human influence upon the land was contributing to a loss in pollination and a disruption in the provision of nutrients and fresh water.

“We are clearing land, we are degrading land, we introduce feral animals and take the top predators out, we change the marine ecosystem by overfishing — it’s a death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “That direct impact upon the land is the most important factor right now, even more than climate change.”

There are large variations in conditions around the world, according to the research. For example, land clearing is now concentrated in tropical areas, such as Indonesia and the Amazon, with the practice reversed in parts of Europe. But the overall picture is one of deterioration at a rapid rate.

“It’s fairly safe to say that we haven’t seen conditions in the past similar to ones we see today and there is strong evidence that there [are] tipping points we don’t want to cross,” Steffen said.

“If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5-6 degrees C warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us.

“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37 degrees C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”

Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said. “History has shown that civilizations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

The two studies, published in Science and Anthropocene Review, featured the work of scientists from countries including the U.S., Sweden, Germany, and India. The findings will be presented in seven seminars at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which takes place between Jan. 21 and 25.

[Luther Blissett]

Scientists: Human activity has pushed Earth beyond four of nine ‘planetary boundaries’
By Joel Achenbach January 15

At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.

The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.

“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.

These are not future problems, but rather urgent matters, according to Steffen, who said that the economic boom since 1950 and the globalized economy have accelerated the transgression of the boundaries. No one knows exactly when push will come to shove, but he said the possible destabilization of the “Earth System” as a whole could occur in a time frame of “decades out to a century.”

The researchers focused on nine separate planetary boundaries first identified by scientists in a 2009 paper. These boundaries set theoretical limits on changes to the environment, and include ozone depletion, freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution and the introduction of exotic chemicals and modified organisms.

Beyond each planetary boundary is a “zone of uncertainty.” This zone is meant to acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in the calculations, and to offer decision-makers a bit of a buffer, so that they can potentially take action before it’s too late to make a difference. Beyond that zone of uncertainty is the unknown — planetary conditions unfamiliar to us.

“The boundary is not like the edge of the cliff,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, an expert on Earth systems at the University of Chicago. “They’re a little bit more like danger warnings, like high-temperature gauges on your car.”

Pierrehumbert, who was not involved in the paper published in Science, added that a planetary boundary “is like an avalanche warning tape on a ski slope.”

The scientists say there is no certainty that catastrophe will follow the transgression of these boundaries. Rather, the scientists cite the precautionary principle: We know that human civilization has risen and flourished in the past 10,000 years — an epoch known as the Holocene — under relatively stable environmental conditions.

No one knows what will happen to civilization if planetary conditions continue to change. But the authors of the Science paper write that the planet “is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies.”

The authors make clear that their goal is not to offer solutions, but simply to provide information. This is a kind of report card, exploiting new data from the past five years.

It’s not just a list of F’s. The ozone boundary is the best example of world leaders responding swiftly to a looming environmental disaster. After the discovery of an expanding ozone hole caused by man-made chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, the nations of the world banned CFCs in the 1980s.

This young field of research draws from such disciplines as ecology, geology, chemistry, atmospheric science, marine biology and economics. It’s known generally as Earth Systems Science. The researchers acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in what they’re doing. Some planetary boundaries, such as “introduction of novel entities” — CFCs would be an example of such things — remain enigmatic and not easily quantified.

Better understood is the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The safe-operating-zone boundary for CO2 had previously been estimated at levels up to 350 parts per million. That’s the boundary — and we’re already past that, with the current levels close to 400 ppm, according to the paper. That puts the planet in the CO2 zone of uncertainty that the authors say extends from 350 to 450 ppm.

At the rate CO2 is rising — about 2 ppm per year — we will surpass 450 ppm in just a couple of decades, said Katherine Richardson, a professor of biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a co-author of the new paper.

Humanity may have run into trouble with planetary boundaries even in prehistoric times, said Richard Alley, a Penn State geoscientist who was not part of this latest research. The invention of agriculture may have been a response to food scarcity as hunting and gathering cultures spread around, and filled up, the planet, he said. “It’s pretty clear we were lowering the carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago,” Alley said.

There are today more than 7 billion people, using an increasing quantity of resources, turning forest into farmland, boosting the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and driving other species to extinction. The relatively sudden efflorescence of humanity has led many researchers to declare that this is a new geological era, the human age, often referred to as the Anthropocene.

The Earth has faced shocks before, and the biosphere has always recovered. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the planet apparently froze over — becoming “Snowball Earth.” About 66 million years ago, it was jolted by a mountain-sized rock from space that killed half the species on the planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth always bounced back. “The planet is going to take care of itself. It’s going to be here,” Richardson said.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in this. If you think about it, the American ethic is, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ And here you have people coming on and saying, no it isn’t, the Earth’s the limit,” she said.

Technology can potentially provide solutions, but innovations often come with unforeseen consequences. “The trends are toward layering on more and more technology so that we are more and more dependent on our technological systems to live outside these boundaries,” Pierrehumbert said. “. . . It becomes more and more like living on a spaceship than living on a planet.”

[Ben D]

The entire 21st century is in the warmest 20 years on record. Most of the rest come after 1985.

No one disagrees with that....there is never a time when the climate is not naturally changing one way or the other...but there is no evidence that the warming im the late 20th century was due to human CO2 emissions, as the last 18 years have seen human CO2 emissions at the highest levels in history and yet the temperatures have not warmed. So this implies that the warming that occurred in the late 20th century was due to natural variability....which way the temperature will go when this present pause ends is yet to be determined.

[Ben D]

It looks like its about 40 years since a below average 20th C temperature was recorded.

What are the odds on that?

This is the natural cycle of climate change over time...treating any one century's global average temperature as the standard is silly...

Yellow indicates the relatively short (approx 15,000 years) interglacial periods, the present being the holocene and coming to an end sometime relatively soon... Green indicates ice ages where the earth climate mainly resides, and soon to be present again....

[DrEvil]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/ ... r-be-used/

Three arguments about climate change that should never be used

...

“The warming is just part of a natural cycle”

Is this a natural cycle? The most important thing to note here is that cycles imply something... well, cyclical. As in things go up, but come back down again. A look at the temperature records of the last century-plus shows that this is exactly what is not happening. Temperatures go up and flatten out at times, but they never go back down. More specifically, next month, it will be 20 years since the last time we had a month where the global temperature was below last century's average.

I don't see any signs of a cycle here.

The other reason that this is a nonsensical argument is that natural cycles aren't some sort of magic—like anthropogenic factors, they influence the climate for physical reasons. In other words, if something natural is heating the atmosphere, we should see some indication of it: a change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, a large pool of warm water at the ocean's surface, or something similar. Just saying "natural" doesn't get you a free pass out of physics, and we haven't seen anything physical that could possibly be causing the warming—nothing other than added CO2.

...

[Ben D]

^ Dr Evil, I don't know if your cut and paste agw alarmism misinformation was meant to address my post....if it was, then I ask you in future to use your own words to make your case...like Joe..

Wrt article, firstly I can only see two supposed reasons, not three..

Now the first is....

"“The warming is just part of a natural cycle”

Is this a natural cycle? The most important thing to note here is that cycles imply something... well, cyclical. As in things go up, but come back down again. A look at the temperature records of the last century-plus shows that this is exactly what is not happening. Temperatures go up and flatten out at times, but they never go back down."


The graph below is used in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, note that the global temperature goes up and down all the time over time, with or without humans, and anyone who thinks that, based just on the thermometer recorded data of just one century and agw computer models predictions, it will in future only ever go up and never go down again, is just plain nuts!!! Look at the graph, before the temperature starts going down, it must pause at the high level before it starts descending...sometimes it may go up again but eventually it always comes back down.




The second reason is.....

"The other reason that this is a nonsensical argument is that natural cycles aren't some sort of magic—like anthropogenic factors, they influence the climate for physical reasons. In other words, if something natural is heating the atmosphere, we should see some indication of it: a change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, a large pool of warm water at the ocean's surface, or something similar. Just saying "natural" doesn't get you a free pass out of physics, and we haven't seen anything physical that could possibly be causing the warming—nothing other than added CO2."

That is an absurd claim, perhaps even a lie....there are other factors influencing global temperature of which there is insufficient data to be quantified accurately....global cloud cover, volcanic atmospheric ash, temperature of the ocean depths, etc..

[Ben D]

Concerning the NOAA - NASA claim that 2104 was the hottest year on record.....it was typical agw scallywag spin as later under questioning by skeptics, they admitted the probability of it being true was 48%...now here on a supplemental page their own website it turns out that it was....get this...."more unlikely than likely" that 2014 was the hottest year on record.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13/supplemental/page-1

And btw...concerning msm agw global climate change hype wrt hottest year ever since records began in 1880.....guess how many hottest years ever have occurred since 1880?

21 in total if we include 2014.....they are....1881 1889 1926 1931 1937 1938 1940 1941 1944 1973 1980 1981 1987 1988 1990 1995 1997 1998 2005 2010 2014.

Actually this warming trend is natural as the earth is still coming out of the last ice age so everyone should expect that glacier melt and sea level rise are normal under the circumstances...so say non-agw climate scientists.

It's only since the agw fear campaign began in the 1990s that new warm records were attributed to mankind...and the UN and its members devised a plan to CO2-tax mankind to mitigate the warming trend...else we will all die from the hot hot hot...so pay up if you don't want to die!

[Joe Hillshoist]

21 in total if we include 2014.....they are....1881 1889 1926 1931 1937 1938 1940 1941 1944 1973 1980 1981 1987 1988 1990 1995 1997 1998 2005 2010 2014.

Yeah and over half those years in that 135 time period occurred in the last 33 years, ie in less than a quarter of the timeframe you provided.

Even if there is a natural warming cycle, AGW is occurring on top of that natural cycle and its happening for the first time ever. Unless you claim CO2 doesn't lead to warmer temps on earth in which case prove it.

No one denies the natural cycle of variation that happens. Its happened within limits that allow life as we know it for a long time. What is happening today is adding more heat to that extra cycle and that is where the danger lies.

[Joe Hillshoist]

One more point. If 1880 was when records began then counting 1881 as a hottest year ever may be accurate factually but its statistically meaningless if the sample size is 2.

[Ben D]

Even if there is a natural warming cycle, AGW is occurring on top of that natural cycle and its happening for the first time ever. Unless you claim CO2 doesn't lead to warmer temps on earth in which case prove it.

No one denies the natural cycle of variation that happens. Its happened within limits that allow life as we know it for a long time. What is happening today is adding more heat to that extra cycle and that is where the danger lies.

Ahhhh...now we are getting to the real point of difference between the skeptics and the agw warmers....no one really knows for sure as to the precise proportion of anthropogenic CO2 warming contribution to the natural climate warming trend...and so long as this detail remains an unknown, it is wrong science for the agw team to claim that human activity is the predominate cause of global warming. And here I'll add that the agw bandwagon has now picked up such a head of steam where not $ billions are in the pipeline, nor $ hundreds of billions, but $ trillions...the global bankers and multinational scammers of the world of capitalism are drooling at the mouth at the prospects of getting a part of the action, all paid for by the tax payers....so the skeptics' scientific case is up against the politics of climate change...a game that the agw scientists play well and get all the grant money they want while non-agw climate scientists get none. This is not how science is meant to be...but for now climate science is corrupted beyond belief.

As to your complaint about the first hottest year in the thermometer records...fine...make that twenty then.....

[Monk]

The entire 21st century is in the warmest 20 years on record. Most of the rest come after 1985.

No one disagrees with that....there is never a time when the climate is not naturally changing one way or the other...but there is no evidence that the warming im the late 20th century was due to human CO2 emissions, as the last 18 years have seen human CO2 emissions at the highest levels in history and yet the temperatures have not warmed. So this implies that the warming that occurred in the late 20th century was due to natural variability....which way the temperature will go when this present pause ends is yet to be determined.

You have to go beyond 18 years and the pauses to see the upward trend:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47

[Monk]

It looks like its about 40 years since a below average 20th C temperature was recorded.

What are the odds on that?

This is the natural cycle of climate change over time...treating any one century's global average temperature as the standard is silly...

Yellow indicates the relatively short (approx 15,000 years) interglacial periods, the present being the holocene and coming to an end sometime relatively soon... Green indicates ice ages where the earth climate mainly resides, and soon to be present again....

Changes in C02 ppm has been tracking changes in ave. temperature.

CO2 ppm is now much higher:

http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatecho ... figure-14/

[Monk]

Concerning the NOAA - NASA claim that 2104 was the hottest year on record.....it was typical agw scallywag spin as later under questioning by skeptics, they admitted the probability of it being true was 48%...now here on a supplemental page their own website it turns out that it was....get this...."more unlikely than likely" that 2014 was the hottest year on record.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13/supplemental/page-1

And btw...concerning msm agw global climate change hype wrt hottest year ever since records began in 1880.....guess how many hottest years ever have occurred since 1880?

21 in total if we include 2014.....they are....1881 1889 1926 1931 1937 1938 1940 1941 1944 1973 1980 1981 1987 1988 1990 1995 1997 1998 2005 2010 2014.

Actually this warming trend is natural as the earth is still coming out of the last ice age so everyone should expect that glacier melt and sea level rise are normal under the circumstances...so say non-agw climate scientists.

It's only since the agw fear campaign began in the 1990s that new warm records were attributed to mankind...and the UN and its members devised a plan to CO2-tax mankind to mitigate the warming trend...else we will all die from the hot hot hot...so pay up if you don't want to die!

A carbon tax is irrelevant given the fact that tax revenues will be used for more consumption. There's also peak oil.

[Monk]

Even if there is a natural warming cycle, AGW is occurring on top of that natural cycle and its happening for the first time ever. Unless you claim CO2 doesn't lead to warmer temps on earth in which case prove it.

No one denies the natural cycle of variation that happens. Its happened within limits that allow life as we know it for a long time. What is happening today is adding more heat to that extra cycle and that is where the danger lies.

Ahhhh...now we are getting to the real point of difference between the skeptics and the agw warmers....no one really knows for sure as to the precise proportion of anthropogenic CO2 warming contribution to the natural climate warming trend...and so long as this detail remains an unknown, it is wrong science for the agw team to claim that human activity is the predominate cause of global warming. And here I'll add that the agw bandwagon has now picked up such a head of steam where not $ billions are in the pipeline, nor $ hundreds of billions, but $ trillions...the global bankers and multinational scammers of the world of capitalism are drooling at the mouth at the prospects of getting a part of the action, all paid for by the tax payers....so the skeptics' scientific case is up against the politics of climate change...a game that the agw scientists play well and get all the grant money they want while non-agw climate scientists get none. This is not how science is meant to be...but for now climate science is corrupted beyond belief.

As to your complaint about the first hottest year in the thermometer records...fine...make that twenty then.....

That's because CO2 ppm is not the primary cause but acts as a forcing factor.

Also, capitalists will support either side. What should be noted, though, is that much of the global economy is still tied to oil, which is why various agreements on lessening emissions have failed.

Thus, it's the other way round: the scientific case for climate change vs. opportunity cost if emissions are decreased. But ultimately even that won't matter because of peak oil.

[Ben D]

You have to go beyond 18 years and the pauses to see the upward trend:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47

You have to be joking.......that graph is irrelevant to our discussion!!! You missed the point that there is no disagreement in the amount of warming...but the pause in increased warming in the 21st century has caused such a deviation between the agw computer model predictions and the actual observed temperatures, that more doubt is being cast on the UN IPCC agw claims.