COP24 - Global catastrophe - climate change

[Write4U]

science has no need for greed, but greed has need for science.
such is the position when scientists give science to corporate greed-mongers
the corporate greed-mongers reply
"but how do i get to take all the food and money if i have to share some of it?"

to which there is no answer, and currently is the only official reply.

Of course, all we need to say ; "You don't get to keep all of it because we say so", and we have the same rights to the nation's common natural resources as you do.

 

[Write4U]

curiously
The deep waters of the pacific ocean have been and are now cooling...

Polar Ice melt?

Seems to me that deep ocean cooling is just as bad as surface warming.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Polar Ice melt?

Seems to me that deep ocean cooling is just as bad as surface warming.

i wonder...
with sea ice receding and faster melt water flowing...
this increases the flow of warm water into the sides of the oceans...
in theory, in places where it should be remaining very cold...
this suggests a potential exponential factor.

problem with deep warm water is its very hard to cool down simply by putting a lid on the top

 

[iceaura]

But, ok, this is my idea about how this works, and real climate change deniers have a different opinion.

You are spouting bs from the standard denier's playbook, exactly as one can find in the media feeds from the rightwing corporate authoritarian think tanks, exactly as one hears from the "experts" on Fox News and the "bothsides" media setups. Seriously: everything you post on climate change is idiotic propaganda from the standard fossil fuel industry shills and Republican Party media feeds. Almost none of it is "your idea".

But the side effect of alarmists in the media presenting themselves as presenting scientific evidence is that scientists lose credibility.

There are lots of people like you, you mean - people who can't tell when they seeing an alarmist and when they are seeing a presentation of sober news.
That's true.
That's not much of a factor in the attacks on scientists's credibility in the US, though. In the US scientists have lost credibility largely through being slandered in the media by paid shills of the fossil fuel industry (or the tobacco industry, or the automobile industry, or agribusiness, or the Republican Party dredging for fundie votes, etc. )

These paid shills say stuff like this:

I believe that political sciences (sciences where there is a strong political interest in favor of a particular scientific result) look quite different. The grad students are poor, and, more seriously, they have no safe job at all. They have to look every two years or so for a new job or a new grant, else they are out. So, whatever they think, they have to care about what the mainstream thinks because the mainstream leaders have control over the jobs and grants. Thus, they have to follow all mainstream fads.

Standard US media feed wingnut vocabulary and claims bolded. None of this is "your idea".

Obviously, any informed and disinterested person would realize that the primary pressure on climate change science is the enormous political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry.

So these people would immediately see that the scientists who have been pressured to keep quiet are the ones working for Exxon et al (whose evaluation of CO2 effects thirty years ago would qualify as "alarmist" even today in the current wingnut vocabulary, but was kept out of the news), and the ones whose grant funding and good standing with their universities demanded that they not anger or threaten big donors and funders (such as the fossil fuel industry), and so forth.

But those paying the shills know that such informed and disinterested people are a minority, do not own or control major media, and can be drowned out.

That explains why the "alarmists" have been not vulnerable grad students cooperating with some fantasy mainstream, but established professors with tenure willing to spend years bucking serious opposition and well-funded personal and professional attacks - people who are difficult to retaliate against, people who have actually done the research and can back up what they say.

 

[iceaura]

curiously
The deep waters of the pacific ocean have been and are now cooling...

As predicted by the climate change researchers. Kind of nice to have the models validated - although it does mean that the warnings about the current ocean warming are more reliable, and thus more urgent.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/70.full

Proxy records show that before the onset of modern anthropogenic warming, globally coherent cooling occurred from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. The long memory of the ocean suggests that these historical surface anomalies are associated with ongoing deep-ocean temperature adjustments. Combining an ocean model with modern and paleoceanographic data leads to a prediction that the deep Pacific is still adjusting to the cooling going into the Little Ice Age, whereas temperature trends in the surface ocean and deep Atlantic reflect modern warming. This prediction is corroborated by temperature changes identified between the HMS Challenger expedition of the 1870s and modern hydrography. The implied heat loss in the deep ocean since 1750 CE offsets one-fourth of the global heat gain in the upper ocean.

 

[sculptor]

Polar Ice melt?

Seems to me that deep ocean cooling is just as bad as surface warming.

The authors of the paper wondered the same thing.
It seems that their best guestimate was that the cold waters were from the "little ice age" circa 200 years ago.
There is an old belief that the deep waters of the ocean basins take centuries to overturn.

(it seems that the more educated you are in your field, the more likely you are to accede to old beliefs within the discipline?)

 

[iceaura]

It seems that their best guestimate was that the cold waters were from the "little ice age" circa 200 years ago.
There is an old belief that the deep waters of the ocean basins take centuries to overturn.

They predicted the finding.
They did not find the cold water, and then guess where it came from. They predicted the cold water, from their research and analysis according to their models of oceanic circulation, and then found it.

 

[Quantum Quack]

2/2019
Hottest January since records kept in Australia. Once in 100 year flooding in Queensland.
Super chill records in USA.
F4 Tornado in ..Havana.
List goes on....

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Bangkok Thailand face masks sold out.
imagine if this pollution becomes poisonous. it will sit on a city of millions for a few days.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-a...ion-crisis-the-city-where-face-masks-sell-out

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Huge Cavity in Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7322

About the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for approximately 4 percent of global sea level rise. It holds enough ice to raise the world ocean a little over 2 feet (65 centimeters) and backstops neighboring glaciers that would raise sea levels an additional 8 feet (2.4 meters) if all the ice were lost.

A gigantic cavity - two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall - growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.

Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.

"We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it," said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rignot is a co-author of the new study, which was published today in Science Advances. "Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail," he said.

 

[Beaconator]

My understanding:
If you take an ice cube and subject it to >0 degree C temperature it is not only the outer surface that heats up.
The whole ice cube is absorbing heat leading to an exponential rate of melt as time progresses.
The Green Land ice sheet is the same as the ice cube. The whole sheet is heating up thus as time progresses the melt rate MUST be exponential.

...am I wrong in my lay understanding?

Only if Jupiter catches fire

 

[Beaconator]

Of course, all we need to say ; "You don't get to keep all of it because we say so", and we have the same rights to the nation's common natural resources as you do.

Hey calm down. Your right but it aint worth the heartbreak

 

[spidergoat]

Bangkok Thailand face masks sold out.
imagine if this pollution becomes poisonous. it will sit on a city of millions for a few days.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-a...ion-crisis-the-city-where-face-masks-sell-out

The sad thing is that kind of mask won't protect anyone from pollution.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

The sad thing is that kind of mask won't protect anyone from pollution.

see the holes around the nose fitting and them worn incorrectly by the majority.
it reduces the total volume of pollution, however all those nasty things that damage childrens immune systems that make them sick for life are not stopped.
thats where everyone except sadiq khan are pretending it doesn't matter.

see the recent ban in Stuttgart

https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-to-introduce-diesel-driving-ban-in-2019/a-44634246

ironically with BREXIT and the theme of anti European pollution regulations the whole alt-right movement seems dead set to try and kill off the rest of the world with pollution as quickly as possible.

https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-d...and-air-quality/how-were-cleaning-londons-air

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Sir David Attenborough is to present an "urgent" new documentary about climate change for BBC One.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47666007

The one-off film will focus on the potential threats to our planet and the possible solutions.

The broadcaster says "conditions have changed far faster" than he ever imagined when he first started talking about the environment 20 years ago.

The documentary will show footage showing the impact global warming has already had.

It will also feature interviews with climatologists and meteorologists to explore the science behind recent extreme weather conditions, including the California wildfires in November 2018.

"It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,"

 

[Quantum Quack]

Here is an article published in a news letter. ( for Australian consumption but very relevant generally)

Below is a thought provoking article about climate change, written by former coal boss Ian Dunlop. It was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 14 March 2019 - I hope you enjoy it.

"As an ex-coal boss, I'm telling politicians: wake up to climate threat"
Human-induced climate change is happening faster than officially acknowledged. Extreme events intensify, particularly in Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Victoria and Tasmania are ablaze again. Queensland needs a decade to recover from recent floods. Much of south-east Australia has become a frying pan, curtailing human activity.

The economic and social cost is massive – as Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Guy Debelle warned us this week – but too many of our leaders refuse absolutely to acknowledge climate change as the cause.

Given the overwhelming evidence and repeated warnings of the dangers we face, even as a former oil, gas and coal industry executive I find it incomprehensible that proposals for new fossil fuel projects proliferate, encouraged by government and opposition alike: Adani’s Carmichael, Glencore’s Wandoan, Kepco’s Bylong, Whitehaven’s Maules Creek, Shenhua’s Watermark, along with 20 other NSW coal projects, Shell’s CSG and LNG expansion, Northern Territory and West Australian fracking, Statoil in the Great Australian Bight, HELE coal-fired power stations ... the list goes on.

These projects are crimes against humanity. Fossil fuel investment must stop, now. As the cost of three decades of climate denial mount, the incumbency becomes evermore hysterical, lying and dissembling to avoid accountability – “we will meet our climate obligations at a canter”.

The government’s 26 - 28 per cent emission reduction by 2030 is laughable in the context of the real obligations of climate policy, which Australia signed up to in 1992 with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, namely: “stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”

We have failed totally to meet those obligations. Dangerous climate change is occurring with the 1 degree warming already experienced. The lower 1.5 degree limit of the Paris Agreement will be here this decade. The upper 2 degree limit is now the boundary of extremely dangerous climate change. On our current emissions trajectory, warming will be 3 degrees to 4 degrees long before 2100. This is a world incompatible with maintaining civilised society.

Natural ecosystems can no longer adapt to climate change, as accelerating species extinction and collapse of the Great Barrier Reef demonstrate. Food production is under threat. Sustainable development is impossible within the current economic paradigm.

The task now is to avoid triggering irreversible, non-linear tipping points, where climatic changes spiral rapidly beyond our sphere of influence, with the potential to eradicate humanity. This is an immediate existential threat, with little time to act.

The West Antarctic ice sheet has passed its tipping point, quite possibly locking in a metre of sea level rise by 2100. The Arctic permafrost, East Antarctic ice sheet and Amazon rainforest are close behind. Yet we continue to increase emissions with abandon, even though the dire implications have long been known.

The current climate and energy debate is irrelevant. Our emissions must be cut by 50 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050. This requires emergency action, akin to wartime: the suspension of political and corporate “business as usual”, to do whatever it takes to resolve the climate crisis.

Other countries must do more, but rhetoric that our domestic emissions of 1.3 per cent of the global total make us an insignificant player in the emission stakes is utter nonsense. As LNG exports increase, Australia will shortly become the world’s fourth largest carbon polluter when exports are included, as they must be, given that climate change is a global problem. What Australia does matters.

We face massive societal and cultural change, but Australia has far greater potential to prosper in the low-carbon future than in the high-carbon past. Realising that potential requires an all-encompassing commitment to emergency action. Certainly there will be costs, but we have solutions and the cost of ignoring climate change will be far greater.

This requires leadership prepared to honestly articulate these risks, and the real way forward, particularly the need for a fair transition for those adversely affected. At present Australia is totally unprepared for what is about to happen. Politicians must bury their differences and co-operate for the common good.

Business, investors and lobbyists must stop immoral, predatory delay. They must stop publicly advocating urgent climate action while privately maximising returns from unsustainable practices before the shutters finally come down on fossil fuels.

To halt our suicidal rush to oblivion, the community must ensure no leader is elected or appointed in this country unless they are committed to emergency action.

Ian Dunlop is a former international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is co-author of What Lies Beneath: the understatement of existential climate risk, and of the Club of Rome’s Climate Emergency Plan.

 

[Schmelzer]

I see no reason for panic. Some explanation why I have written down in https://ilja-schmelzer.de/climate/

 

[RainbowSingularity]

panic

The word means nothing except your political bent.

you must define what panic is in this instance to define what is not needed.

what is your idea of what

panic

would be ?

 

[Schmelzer]

"Panic" is believing nonsense like "It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,"

 

[Quantum Quack]

"Panic" is believing nonsense like "It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,"

It is going to happen a lot sooner than that. Based on current trends we should see an unprecedented global economic melt down by mid next year. The anarchy you have wished for by the end of next year to mid year following.

Yeah so don't panic!
Global actauaries are starting to panic already. No insurance cover means no investment...no loans, no crop funding etc...