QS2
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Global Warming
I just saw a report indicating that the IPCC reports are still probably dangerously underestimating the current problem over here. Which indicates we are at current exceeding even the worst case scenarios taking into account.
Of course this is no reason to lose hope, there are plenty of things we can do still, up to and including terraforming our own world. Which is actually becoming a rather interesting proposition lately, because the worst case scenarios are rather terrifying and mucking around with our planets climate on purpose seems rather less risky in comparison...
So taking this in to account, what might our world be like in 2050 or 2100? What might we have done, or not done, which policies do you think might be tried and which do you think might work?
PS, If anyone here doesn't believe in climate change, we can start a thread about that elsewhere, I'm rather familiar with the subject and would be happy to discuss it. 
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2/15/2009, 1:17 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
One theory, which I agree partially with, is that we should spend less effort on undoing global warming and more effort on adapting to it. Now, I personally think ignoring the problem is a mistake -- and even the scientist who gave the talk suggested that we at least halt the growth of the problem -- but the other part makes sense. Even if we totally stopped all C02 (etc) production today, it's estimated that the rise in temperatures, sea level, etc, will take another hundred years to die down.
So it makes sense to put some effort into adapting our culture to the "new world" where sea levels will be higher, weather variability will be larger, and animal and plant migrations or extinctions might occur.
One of the most obvious things to do is simply to keep people from living right on the coast, especially in low-lying areas and areas prone to hurricanes (which are expected to become more frequenct). Yet, at least in the US, you don't hear anything about this. One way to go about it would be for insurance companies to charge more for sea-side houses. After all, it makes sense to do so, if the risk to those places is going up. This would have the secondary benefit of keeping many new people from wanting to move to the shore. It makes more sense to me to prevent people from getting into dangerous situations than to encourage them to go into such situations, and then have to constantly bail them out.
We should also expect to have to train our farmers to grow new, warmer-weather, drought- and/or flood-resistant crops. Our fishermen may need to move or adapt to fishing for new species. As sea species slowly migrate, we may even need to limit the catches in number, just to make sure we don't wipe them out during the instability of their travels.
There are probably a lot of other things we should do, but I've already stalled at my work for long enough now.  What do you guys think?
---  -- YAR! |
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2/17/2009, 10:12 pm
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
Well sea catches need to decline in any case, even now. Many fisheries already have been annihilate and many others are approaching that point and the changing climate is just making things worse. 
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2/17/2009, 11:00 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
True. Actually, that sort of logic works for a lot of issues. For example, we need to cut down on burning oil not just for environmental reasons, but also because it's running out (relative to projected demand). You'd think that would make global warming just another motivator, not such a big deal.
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2/18/2009, 2:52 am
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
Well... a lot of people don't believe it is running out compared to projected demand, or atleast find it hard to believe...
On the other hand I guess that explains all those previous disaster of the commons scenarios... 
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2/18/2009, 11:14 am
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David Meadows
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Re: Global Warming
quote:
Reythia wrote:
One way to go about it would be for insurance companies to charge more for sea-side houses. After all, it makes sense to do so, if the risk to those places is going up. This would have the secondary benefit of keeping many new people from wanting to move to the shore.
And the tertiary benefit of wiping out more rich people in hurricanes 
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And all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "save us!"...
...and I'll look down and whisper "no."
Rorschach
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2/18/2009, 12:05 pm
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
Well we can build for Earthquakes like that..., of course for some reason the building code doesn't seem quite strict enough to insure buildings typically come through undamaged. I guess people are trying to have it both way, cheap housing that's earthquake resistant. Yeah...., that will end well... 
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2/18/2009, 5:46 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
I (re)learned a neat thing today.
Don Chambers gave the seminar today. He talked about a bunch of his different satellite oceanography findings, which were really all rather interesting. But the relevant thing to this discussion was a comment he made at the end about sea level rise. He'd earlier showed that the linear trend to the non-steric sea level rise measured by both GRACE and by a combination of JASON altimetry and ARGO bottom pressure gauges was about 1 mm/yr over the last ~5 years.
A guy in the audience commented, "But I've worked with tide gauges in the north Pacific, and I know the linear rise is a lot more than that, there!"
Don responded by reminding us that there are three parts to sea level rise:
1.) Non-steric sea level rise is caused by the addition/loss of water from the continents to the ocean. There's a huge seasonal trend to this, where water cycles back and forth between the continents and the ocean, but that doesn't affect the linear change in sea level. On the other hand, things like melting glaciers and ice sheets do, as does post-glacial rebound and even modern-glacial rebound. This is what most people think about when they hear the phrase "global warming is increasing sea level!". (Other permanent changes, like dams and river changes can also effect sea level in this way.)
2.) Steric sea level is caused when the local ocean and atmospheric temperatures or density (salinity) change. When water gets hotter, it expands, which will make the same amount of water take up more space -- thus raising the sea level. Global warming also affects this, by producing the temperature drivers (and as a second-order effect, by changing local salinity due to melting glaciers).
3.) Sea level can change REGIONALLY due to ocean circulation patterns causing a "tilt" to the mean sea surface levels. That is, the ocean currents can shove more water to one place and away from another, thus increasing sea level in the first region and decreasing it in the second. Global warming almost certainly affects these currents, but the cause is indirect and the response difficult to predict, except in its grossest changes.
The guy asking the question was still confused (and a bit skeptical), because he had previously measured much higher estimates than Don showed, but Don pointed out that tide gauges measure a sum of all three components, and Don was separating out just the first.
The part that struck me, though, was when Don added, "It's entirely possible that in the region you were looking, local sea level rise was ten times as big as what I'm showing. There's a bottom pressure station on an island right in the middle of the Indian Ocean that a lot of climate change skeptics like to draw their data from. Based only off the tide and bottom pressure gauges there, you can demonstrate that sea level isn't rising at all -- locally. And it's a very low-lying island, so the skeptics like to point to it and say, 'Look! If global warming was happening, this island would be under water!' But the fact is, if you do an analysis of the global oceans, you find that the island is almost on top of a node. Sea level is rising like crazy on one side of it, and falling like crazy on the other, but the island experiences almost no change where it is."
I thought it was a neat story, both because it forcibly brought home the differences between an global average and a local average, and also because it demonstrates how easy it could be to get the two confused. To think that what you're reporting is true for the whole world, when it's only true for the places you're looking directly at.
Another reason why satellite data is the best, I say!! Alas that we cannot send them back in time.
...No, I'm not biased against ground measurements at all. Really! 
--- -- YAR! |
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2/24/2009, 9:40 pm
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
To bad the CO2 measuring satellite launch failed recently, having measured CO2 levels in more detail around the world would have been very useful. I wonder how long this will set back this research...
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2/25/2009, 1:39 am
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Blitzen
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Re: Global Warming
I read (some of) this today. I fully expect everyone here to disagree with it.
Last edited by Blitzen, 9/9/2009, 11:08 am
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Quick! Competition! Vote for your favourite comic scripts
http://forums.millarworld.tv/index.php?showtopic=90564&st=20
It's not clicky, though, sorry
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9/9/2009, 11:05 am
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
Yeah.... there are lots of things wrong with it and one dead give away is that they published it in a medical journal and not in a climate science one. Cherry picking of graphs is prevalent, citing graphs that are irrelevant and presenting them as if they are relevant. Misquoting research, or misrepresenting science on how the feedback loops function. Basically it's no good at all. Just as an example I know the graphs on CO2 enhancing plant growth are utter BS, in real life what they claim there doesn't happen at all due to all kinds of other effects. It's just a cute lab situation which never happens in reality.
In all seriousness the research is pretty clear by now and the answers have been backed by all the academies of science of the entire globe. You really don't get better backing then that and to get that kind of backing is ridiculously hard. Actually it's never happened before because scientists will argue over almost anything, to get that kind of backing you pretty much must have run down any reasonable question on a topic and have answered it beyond any reasonable doubt. (Which is a ridiculous amount of effort and basically where all those billions in climate research went in to, answering all those corner cases)
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9/9/2009, 1:49 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Global Warming
Yes, but it still interests me that so many people are against the idea of it. I think when historians look back at global warming in a few hundred years, they won't look so much at cause/ prevention, they'll look at hysteria and why so many people refused to believe.
I'm more interested in the people than the science, anyway.
But I knew it wouldn't be long until you or Reythia quashed it. 
---
Quick! Competition! Vote for your favourite comic scripts
http://forums.millarworld.tv/index.php?showtopic=90564&st=20
It's not clicky, though, sorry
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9/9/2009, 3:20 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
Alas, I can't quash it thoroughly and in detail, since my freaking adobe acrobat program keeps crashing every time I get to the second or third page! But even from the abstract and intro, I can quash it in general!
The trouble with all these anti-climate-change papers is that they all start with a seed of truth. There IS a long-scale glaciation pattern. And the Earth IS in the slowly and naturally warming part of that pattern. These natural changes ARE largely the effect of the sun.
So I won't deny that some of the change we see may be due to these natural cycles. On the other hand, such cycles have historically occurred on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Ie:
Ice Age Temperatures
Saying the ~200-year changes that we're seeing now is the same thing is like saying that dying from a bullet to the brain and dying of old age in your bed are the same thing, because in either case your cellular activity ceases. The final result may be the same, but neither the time scale that result occurs on nor the reason behind that result are the same!
I honestly don't know where the authors of this article got their data, since the first few plots I could get to before adobe crashed didn't look anything like what I've seen in other journals. That by itself makes me skeptical. Figure 2 makes me MORE skeptical, since "normalized glacier length" is NOT a unit used in glaciology. It's neither specific enough nor meaningful -- it doesn't include either the height or width of the glaciers (or alternatively volume), nor tell us which 169 glaciers were used, nor if they were land-locked or coastal glaciers, arctic or antarctic or neither, calving or not calving, clustered or not clustered. Without such information, the plot is meaningless. Figure 6 is even MORE useless, since it compares four quantities which occur on completely different timescales.
Are the rest of the figures are equally as vague? Because those two figures by themselves would be enough to get this rejected from a geology journal like JGR. How did it get published in a MEDICAL journal anyhow??
Last edited by Reythia, 9/9/2009, 4:12 pm
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9/9/2009, 4:10 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
I learned something interesting at lunch last week on this matter, by the way. My boss had been invited to a geophysics conference, to give an overview of our satellite mission status (the data of which is used by many of the scientists at the meeting). So naturally, when he was done, he stayed to listen. Now, like me, my boss is an aerospace engineer. He didn't really have the technical background -- or at least the technical vocabulary -- to grasp the details of what they were saying. This irked him, so he dug into Wikipedia and some technical books and papers to sort out the terms. And then told us at lunch what he'd found. (I've also looked it up since.)
Apparently, we're in the middle of an "ice age" right now! Yeah, I was taught in fifth grade that the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago, too. Apparently, though, the technical definition of "ice age" is really "period where there are significant year-long polar ice caps". Both poles still have ice on them all year round (and Antarctica and Greenland, at least, will for some time to come), so we're still in an "ice age". This current ice age started some 2.5 million years ago, apparently. There's evidence of 3-4 ice ages before that, but the further back you go, the harder it is to determine if an ice age happened, since the most recent ice ages tend to cover up evidence of ones before them. Anyhow, the point is that except for during these ice ages, the Earth actually had no year-long ice at the poles. (And thus had much higher oceans.) On the opposite side of things, there's some (controversial) evidence that at the height of some of these ice ages, the ENTIRE Earth may have been covered in glaciers (a "snowball Earth").
So what happened some 10,000 years ago, during that thing my fifth grade science teacher called an "ice age"? Well, glaciologists technically call it a "glacial period" instead. Right now we're in an "interglacial period". While the "ice age" cycle takes tens or hundreds of millions of years, the "glacial" cycle takes only tens of thousands of years -- much easier for us humans to see. Which is probably why people get the terms mixed up. But the mix up of terms might ALSO explain why some non-geologists keep getting their facts screwed up. If the geophysicists say "the glacial cycle has an amplitude of X", they're talking about the larger cycle taking millions of years. But non-geophysicists may hear that and think they mean the shorter, less intense glacial cycle instead. I can definitely see how that would cause confusion!
--- -- YAR! |
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9/9/2009, 4:26 pm
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QS2
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Re: Global Warming
Yeah, that's true Reythia, I'd gotten that in the few Bio-Geology courses I'd followed over this matter.
What it basically comes down to is, is that even an interglacial is actually still rather cold for this planet, which is part of the reason some people are a bit worried. It isn't like we are anywhere close to the ceiling after all, we've got lots of room above us if we just mess things up enough.
Another interesting tidbit is, is that as far as we know our current many million year long ice age cycle is still... or atleast was still in the cooling down phase, with the glacial phases tending to get progressively colder and the interglacials being kind of more stable like, though I think I saw some decline in temperature for that as well. As far as I know, our last glacial period ending some 15k ago was the coldest one yet. Heck it was so cold it actually started getting in the way of forming ice, thus limiting the extent of it some what compared to previous glacial cycles.
And if everyone didn't know this yet, the cycle length is about one hundred thousand years, which matches pretty well with the Milankovich cycle. This cycle is a longer period of shifts in orbital and axial tilts of the Earth, which changes the amount of sun we get, it's not a very big shift, but seemingly enough to kick us in and out of massively cold glacial periods.(Though it's mildly worrisome that minor changes can have gigantic consequences and if this isn't the reason why... well then we have no clue what drives the glacial cycle otherwise...) In the more early stages of this ice age, we had a shorter cycle based on the shortest change of the Earth, I believe this was the obliquity level (Axial tilt shifting) which is something like a 42k year process.Or alternatively it is the Precession (Which is how the earth spins around its axis, like how a top tends to spin around its spinning axis, try it out if you don't know what I mean) Which is I think a 21k year effect, I'm not really sure which one it was any more though. (Though both matter for the larger Milankovich cycle)
So early on it jumped up and down a bit more and somewhat more regularly. Only when it got really cold did we move to this longer 100k regime, I'm guessing because it needs a bigger boost to claw itself back up. Which also means that for all we know, if things got even colder yet, that we might have eventually ended up in a somewhat more stable long cold era. Well we don't really have a clue about that though, we just don't know enough to predict such long term events. Still it is some interesting food for thought about what the planet might have done, if we weren't around.
PS Reythia, I think many of those graphs are only of rather specific locations, thus making it not match what you are used to see on a global scale. (Also.... why are you using Acrobat Reader? Surely there is something better for PDF reading...)
Last edited by Firlefanz, 9/9/2009, 5:53 pm
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9/9/2009, 5:21 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Global Warming
quote:
QS2 wrote:
...we had a shorter cycle based on the shortest change of the Earth, I believe this was the obliquity level (Axial tilt shifting) which is something like a 42k year process.Or alternatively it is the Precession (Which is how the earth spins around its axis, like how a top tends to spin around its spinning axis, try it out if you don't know what I mean) Which is I think a 21k year effect, I'm not really sure which one it was any more though. (Though both matter for the larger Milankovich cycle)
Haha! Don't feel bad, QS. I have the exact same problem (and it's probably more relevant for me than you, too). The math for precession and nutation is identical, the results are identical (except in magnitude and frequency, of course)... and that means I can't keep the terms separated in my head. I always have to look up which is which when I need to use them!
quote:
I think many of those graphs are only of rather specific locations, thus making it not match what you are used to see on a global scale.
You may be right, which is another example of the BADness of that article.
quote:
(Also.... why are you using Acrobat Reader? Surely there is something better for PDF reading...)
Possibly, but Acrobat is installed on the work computers, and generally it works just fine. Also, it's easy to MAKE pdf's from ps's with it.
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9/10/2009, 4:02 pm
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