climate change denial is worse than anti-vax movement

[The Mad Monk]

...and yet, fanny remains.

[Dinner]

In retrospect that probably would have been a better word.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

There's a flood of this stuff today...

Threat from global warming heightened in latest U.N. report
Reuters
9 hours ago



Smoke billows from the chimneys of a heating plant in Jilin, Jilin province January 8, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer



YOKOHAMA, Japan (Reuters) - Global warming poses a growing threat to the health, economic prospects, and food and water sources of billions of people, top scientists said in a report that urges swift action to counter the effects of carbon emissions.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the effects of warming are being felt everywhere, fuelling potential food shortages, natural disasters and raising the risk of wars.

"The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate," the IPCC said on Monday, after the final text of the report was agreed.

More warming increased the chance of harsh, widespread impacts that could be surprising or irreversible, it added.

The report projects global warming may cut world economic output by between 0.2 and 2.0 percent a year should mean temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), estimates that many countries say are too low.

"Over the coming decades, climate change will have mostly negative impacts," said Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), citing cities, ecosystems and water supply as being among the areas at risk.

"The poor and vulnerable will be most affected," he added.

The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme.

RISK EMPHASIS

The report emphasizes the risks, and portrays cuts to greenhouse gas emissions as an insurance policy for the planet.

"Climate change is really a challenge of managing risks," Christopher Field, co-chair of the IPCC group preparing the report, told Reuters before its release on Monday.

The risks range from death to disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small islands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise, the report said.

Immediate action is needed, says the report, which follows a warning that humans are probably responsible for global warming thought to cause droughts, colder weather and rising sea levels.

"Unless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. "Denial of the science is malpractice."

Still, many governments have pleaded for greater scientific certainty before making billion-dollar investments in everything from flood barriers to renewable energies.

"There are those who say we can't afford to act. But waiting is truly unaffordable. The costs of inaction are catastrophic," Kerry said.

Global warming will worsen health threats, damage crop yields and bring floods, the report says. It could also deepen poverty and worsen economic shocks at the heart of conflict.

The report is the second in a four-part IPCC series meant to guide governments that have promised to agree a pact in 2015 to slow climate change. The first, in September, raised to least 95 percent the probability that most global warming is man-made, from 90 percent in 2007.

The panel's credibility faces scrutiny after one of its reports, in 2007, exaggerated the melt of Himalayan glaciers, but reviews said the error did not undermine key findings.

Climate scientists say they are more certain than ever that mankind is the main culprit behind global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries.

The report pulls together the work of hundreds of scientists but skeptics have been emboldened by the fact that temperatures have risen more slowly recently, despite rising emissions.

One of the authors, Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in England, pulled out of the writing team last week, saying he thought the report was too alarmist.

The United Nations urged governments to step up work for a deal to fight climate change.

"This report requires and requests that everyone accelerate and scale up efforts towards a low carbon world and manage the risks of climate change," the United Nations climate chief, Christiana Figueres, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Aaron Sheldrick and Chris Meyers; Editing by Richard Pullin and Clarence Fernandez)

http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming...000714495.html

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Global warming dials up our risks, UN report says
Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN 16 hours ago



FILE - This May 6, 2008 file photo, shows an aerial view of devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis, seen at an unknown location in Myanmar. Freaky storms like 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and 2008’s ultra-deadly Cyclone Nargis may not have been caused by warming, but their fatal storm surges were augmented by climate change’s ever rising seas, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said. Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a United Nations scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun. (AP Photo/File)



YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — If the world doesn't cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral "out of control," the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he's not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying "the costs of inaction are catastrophic."

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued the 32-volume, 2,610-page report here early Monday, told The Associated Press: "it is a call for action." Without reductions in emissions, he said, impacts from warming "could get out of control."

One of the study's authors, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, "If we don't reduce greenhouse gases soon, risks will get out of hand. And the risks have already risen."

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, according to the report from the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report's authors said.

"We're now in an era where climate change isn't some kind of future hypothetical," said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. "We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential."

Nobody is immune, Pachauri and other scientists said.

"We're all sitting ducks," Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the report, said in an interview.

After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 49-page summary — which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word "risk" an average of about 5 1/2 times per page.

"Changes are occurring rapidly and they are sort of building up that risk," Field said.

These risks are both big and small, according to the report. They are now and in the future. They hit farmers and big cities. Some places will have too much water, some not enough, including drinking water. Other risks mentioned in the report involve the price and availability of food, and to a lesser and more qualified extent some diseases, financial costs and even world peace.

"Things are worse than we had predicted" in 2007, when the group of scientists last issued this type of report, said report co-author Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Bangladesh. "We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated."

The problems have gotten so bad that the panel had to add a new and dangerous level of risks. In 2007, the biggest risk level in one key summary graphic was "high" and colored blazing red. The latest report adds a new level, "very high," and colors it deep purple.

You might as well call it a "horrible" risk level, said van Aalst: "The horrible is something quite likely, and we won't be able to do anything about it."

The report predicts that the highest level of risk would first hit plants and animals, both on land and the acidifying oceans.

Climate change will worsen problems that society already has, such as poverty, sickness, violence and refugees, according to the report. And on the other end, it will act as a brake slowing down the benefits of a modernizing society, such as regular economic growth and more efficient crop production, it says.

"In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans," the report says.

And if society doesn't change, the future looks even worse, it says: "Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts."

While the problems from global warming will hit everyone in some way, the magnitude of the harm won't be equal, coming down harder on people who can least afford it, the report says. It will increase the gaps between the rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old, and men and women, van Aalst said.

But the report's authors say this is not a modern day version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Much of what they warn of are more nuanced troubles that grow by degrees and worsen other societal ills. The report also concedes that there are uncertainties in understanding and predicting future climate risks.

The report, the fifth on warming's impacts, includes risks to the ecosystems of the Earth, including a thawing Arctic, but it is far more oriented to what it means to people than past versions.

The report also notes that one major area of risk is that with increased warming, incredibly dramatic but ultra-rare single major climate events, sometimes called tipping points, become more possible with huge consequences for the globe. These are events like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would take more than 1,000 years.

"I can't think of a better word for what it means to society than the word 'risk,'" said Virginia Burkett of the U.S. Geological Survey, one of the study's main authors. She calls global warming "maybe one of the greatest known risks we face."

Global warming is triggered by heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide, that stay in the atmosphere for a century. Much of the gases still in the air and trapping heat came from the United States and other industrial nations. China is now by far the No. 1 carbon dioxide polluter, followed by the United States and India.

Unlike in past reports, where the scientists tried to limit examples of extremes to disasters that computer simulations can attribute partly to man-made warming, this version broadens what it looks at because it includes the larger issues of risk and vulnerability, van Aalst said.

Freaky storms like 2013's Typhoon Haiyan, 2012's Superstorm Sandy and 2008's ultra-deadly Cyclone Nargis may not have been caused by warming, but their fatal storm surges were augmented by climate change's ever rising seas, he said.

And in the cases of the big storms like Haiyan, Sandy and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the poor were the most vulnerable, Oppenheimer and van Aalst said. The report talks about climate change helping create new pockets of poverty and "hotspots of hunger" even in richer countries, increasing inequality between rich and poor.

Report co-author Maggie Opondo of the University of Nairobi said that especially in places like Africa, climate change and extreme events mean "people are going to become more vulnerable to sinking deeper into poverty." And other study authors talked about the fairness issue with climate change.

"Rich people benefit from using all these fossil fuels," University of Sussex economist Richard Tol said. "Poorer people lose out."

Huq said he had hope because richer nations and people are being hit more, and "when it hits the rich, then it's a problem" and people start acting on it.

Part of the report talks about what can be done: reducing carbon pollution and adapting to and preparing for changing climates with smarter development.

The report echoes an earlier U.N. climate science panel that said if greenhouse gases continue to rise, the world is looking at another about 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 or 4 degrees Celsius) of warming by 2100 instead of the international goal of not allowing temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius). The difference between those two outcomes, Princeton's Oppenheimer said, "is the difference between driving on an icy road at 30 mph versus 90 mph. It's risky at 30, but deadly at 90."

Tol, who is in the minority of experts here, had his name removed from the summary because he found it "too alarmist," harping too much on risk.

But the panel vice chairman, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, said that's not quite right: "We are pointing for reasons for alarm ... It's because the facts and the science and the data show that there are reasons to be alarmed. It's not because we're alarmist."

The report is based on more than 12,000 peer reviewed scientific studies. Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, a co-sponsor of the climate panel, said this report was "the most solid evidence you can get in any scientific discipline."

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn't part of this report, said he found the report "very conservative" because it is based on only peer reviewed studies and has to be approved unanimously.

There is still time to adapt to some of the coming changes and reduce heat-trapping emissions, so it's not all bad, said study co-author Patricia Romero-Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

"We have a closing window of opportunity," she said. "We do have choices. We need to act now."

___

Online:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch

http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming...001136062.html

[Ben Kenobi]

If I didn't know any better I'd say that climatology is incredibly complex, and probably a bit beyond the abilities of our best scientists to accurately predict. And if that were the case, I'd have a tough time justifying trillions of dollars on a huge project to save the world from a two degree change in average temperature.

When observed climate for the previous 15 years is below 98 percent of the models, one would suspect that there's a problem with the models.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Climate change threatens India's economy, food security: IPCC
Reuters
By Nita Bhalla 5 hours ago



NEW DELHI, March 31 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - India's high vulnerability and exposure to climate change will slow its economic growth, impact health and development, make poverty reduction more difficult and erode food security, a new report by scientists said on Monday.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stresses the risks of global warming and tries to make a stronger case for governments to adopt policy on adaptation and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is the most extensive piece of science done on climate adaptation up until now," Aromar Revi, one of the lead authors of the report, told a news conference. "The key issue as far as India is concerned is vulnerability and exposure."

The report predicts a rise in global temperatures of between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit) and a rise of up to 82 cm (32 inches) in sea levels by the late 21st century due to melting ice and expansion of water as it warms, threatening coastal cities from Shanghai to San Francisco.

Experts say India is likely to be hit hard by global warming. It is already one of the most disaster-prone nations in the world and many of its 1.2 billion people live in areas vulnerable to hazards such as floods, cyclones and droughts.

Freak weather patterns will not only affect agricultural output and food security, but will also lead to water shortages and trigger outbreaks of water and mosquito-borne diseases such as diarrhea and malaria in many developing nations.

"All aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change including food access, utilization of land, and price stability," said Revi, adding that studies showed wheat and rice yields were decreasing due to climatic changes.

The IPCC lead authors said India, like many other developing nations, is likely to suffer losses in all major sectors of the economy including energy, transport, farming and tourism.

For example, evidence suggests tourists will choose to spend their holidays at higher altitudes due to cooler temperatures or the sea level rises, hitting beach resorts.

India ranked as the most vulnerable of 51 countries in terms of beach tourism, while Cyprus is the least vulnerable in one study which was examined by the IPCC scientists.

Extreme weather may also harm infrastructure such as roads, ports and airports, impacting delivery of goods and services.

"The world has realized mitigation is absolutely critical and probably the most effective form of adaptation but adaptation processes have to be accelerated, especially in ... lower middle-income countries like India," said Revi.

(Editing by Gareth Jones)

http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change...8--sector.html

[Ben Kenobi]

If Climate Change were accepted by everyone everywhere would we find government policy that would actually have traction and everyone's footprint would be lower.

Oddly enough population control would achieve the same end.

[AAAAAAAAH!]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]175622[/ATTACH]

Although we're within the projections, it's hard for me to take the predictive power of the models seriously. You'd think we'd be on the high end of the estimates since we've done jack **** to prevent Global Climate Change, but we're on the low end instead.

If I didn't know any better I'd say that climatology is incredibly complex, and probably a bit beyond the abilities of our best scientists to accurately predict. And if that were the case, I'd have a tough time justifying trillions of dollars on a huge project to save the world from a two degree change in average temperature.

From the graph it doesn't look like their projections were that bad. Also, while it's true we haven't done much about global warming, you can't guess from the graph what assumptions they made about future carbon dioxide emissions. For all we know their assumptions about the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions may have been accurate.

[Ben Kenobi]

From the graph it doesn't look like their projections were that bad. Also, while it's true we haven't done much about global warming, you can't guess from the graph what assumptions they made about future carbon dioxide emissions. For all we know their assumptions about the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions may have been accurate.

Given the number of predictions on that graph? It's impossible for the difference between the mean projected temperature and the actual temperature to be attributed to random chance. That there are so many that are high means that there's something wrong with the models.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Ben, in 100 words or less, what is your belief of the truth of the climate change situation?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

UN panel: Warming worsens food, hunger problems
Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN 17 hours ago



A United Nations report warns climate change is already having a sweeping effect on all continents and oceans. If greenhouse gases are not controlled, the report warns of more coastal flooding



YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said.

A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday.

"We're facing the specter of reduced yields in some of the key crops that feed humanity," panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in press conference releasing the report.

Even though heat and carbon dioxide are often considered good for plants, the overall effect of various aspects of man-made warming is that it will reduce food production compared to a world without global warming, the report said.

The last time the panel reported on the effects of warming in 2007, it said it was too early to tell whether climate change would increase or decrease food production, and many skeptics talked of a greening world. But in the past several years the scientific literature has been overwhelming in showing that climate change hurts food production, said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science and lead author of the climate report.

But this doesn't mean in 50 years there will be less food grown. Thanks to the "green revolution" of improved agricultural techniques, crop production is growing about 10 percent per decade and climate change is likely to reduce yields by 1 percent a decade, so crop production will still go up, but not as fast, said David Lobell of Stanford University, one of the authors of the report's chapter on food problems.



FILE - In this Oct. 7, 2013 file photo, workers collect red grapes in the vineyards of the famed Chateau Haut Brion, a Premier Grand Cru des Graves, during the grape harvest in Pessac-Leognan, near Bordeaux, southwestern France. Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said. A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday, March 31, 2014. (AP Photo/Bob Edme, FILE)


Still, it is as if an anchor is weighing down the improvements to agriculture, Pachauri and Field said. Some places have seen crop yield increases drop from 2 percent a year to 1 percent or even plateau. And places like India, where 800 million people rely on rainfall not irrigation, the green revolution never improved crops much, Pachauri said.

Although changes in rainfall hurt, mostly the problem will be too much heat, Lobell said. "No place is immune," he said.

Food prices are likely to go up somewhere in a wide range of 3 percent to 84 percent by 2050 just because of climate change, the report said.

"In a world where a billion people are already going hungry, this makes it harder for more people to feed their families," said Tim Gore of Oxfam International, who wasn't part of this study.

While some crops may do slightly better, staples like wheat and corn will be hurt, the Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists said. The report specifically mentions warming squeezing out crops in some of the richer coffee-growing areas in Central and South America, apple orchards in eastern Washington and cherry orchards in California.



FILE - In this Aug. 29, 2011 file photo, bins of pinot noir grapes are loaded onto a trailer after being picked at the Game Farm vineyard on the first day of harvest for Mumm Napa in Oakville, Calif. Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said. A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday, March 31, 2014. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)


And where you get your wine may be changing. Both quantity and quality of wine can be hurt in much of Europe, the United States and Australia, but Portugal and British Columbia in Canada may become better places for wine, the report said.

It's not just crops on land. A warmer and more acidic ocean is changing where fish live, making them harder to catch, and making it harder to feed people who rely on fish, Pachauri said.

___

Online:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch

http://news.yahoo.com/un-panel-warmi...075505181.html

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Can you make gasoline that slows down global warming? Google Ventures thinks so
Cool Planet's tailpipe dream nets $100 million in funding
By Ben Popper on March 31, 2014 10:45 am






Cool Planet, a startup headquartered in Colorado, announced a major $100 million round of financing today. Investors include a roster of big names including Google Ventures, BP, General Electric, and ConocoPhillips. Last month the company broke ground on its first commercial plant, located in Louisiana, and this new capital will go towards completing that infrastructure and building two more Louisiana facilities.


Cool Planet argues that its process takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it adds in


Like many biofuels companies before it, Cool Planet makes liquid fuel from plant matter, mostly leftover agricultural waste like corn cobs and sugar canes. Its insight was that during this process it could also create biochar, a substance that comes from burning plants under extreme heat and pressure with little to no oxygen. The biochar prevents carbon dioxide from escaping as the plants decay and can be spread on farmland, helping the soil retain water and nutrients, boosting crop yields. Because the biochar keeps carbon in the ground for years, even centuries, Cool Planet argues that its process takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it adds in.

Cool Planet's huge funding round comes amidst a series of setbacks for the biofuels industry. A recent 60 Minutes episode focused on the struggles of these companies, many of which have lost 75 percent or more of their value since going public. The result has been billions in losses for venture capital firms and, 60 Minutes argues, the taxpayers who helped subsidize them.


"We have learned a lot from the mistakes made by our predecessors."


"We have learned a lot from the mistakes made by our predecessors and are taking a fresh approach," says Howard Janzen, Cool Planet's CEO. Rather than building large facilities that produce hundreds of million of gallons of fuel per year, Cool Planet is creating small modular facilities that can be built near the site of the feedstock. "If you don't have to transport the biomass a long way to the facility, you can really cut both costs and your carbon footprint."

The company is also being careful not to rely on any plants that double as food sources: for instance, corn, which can be used to create ethanol and saw a number of volatile price spikes in recent years. It's also trying to diversify its revenue streams, selling its product as a blend to be mixed in with traditional gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. It sells the biochar to farmers and is looking at using it for cleaning chemicals out of polluted water as well. Finally, the company is planning to sell carbon credits.

"The fossil fuel companies know they will be obligated to obtain these renewable fuel credits," says Janzen. "So we are a technology that helps their current business last longer." In exchange Cool Planet gets customers and can rely on the infrastructure that companies like BP and ConocoPhillips have already put in place.


The science — which worked so well in the lab and pilot facility — will now have to perform at scale


The next two years will reveal a lot about Cool Planet, which says it expects its first Louisiana plant to be producing 10 million gallons of fuel annually by the end of 2015. The science — which worked so well in the lab and pilot facility — will now have to perform at scale.

"Cool Planet is tackling some of the most important environmental issues of our time, and the company's success could change the way the world approaches sustainable energy," said Bill Maris, Google Ventures’ managing partner. "They are working on global problems, such as producing renewable fuels and removing of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. It's the kind of investment that we love at Google Ventures, because the vision is so big."

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/31/55...es-100-million

[Felch]

Food prices are likely to go up somewhere in a wide range of 3 percent to 84 percent by 2050 just because of climate change, the [IPCC] report said.

That's a stupidly wide range. Also, do we know what models the IPCC is basing this off of? The temperature models aren't doing a very good job of predicting climate change, why should their food price model be any better?

[Felch]

From the graph it doesn't look like their projections were that bad. Also, while it's true we haven't done much about global warming, you can't guess from the graph what assumptions they made about future carbon dioxide emissions. For all we know their assumptions about the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions may have been accurate.

According to Hans von Storch, "At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase."

The graphed projections are pretty far off from the observed temperatures. The projections basically assumed that temperatures would rise as they had for the previous thirty years, but instead everything kind of went flat. As Storch said, that only happened two percent of the time in the models. Obviously the models aren't as sophisticated as their designers hoped, and that means that it's flat out stupid to spend trillions of dollars we don't have based on the predictions of lousy models.

There's no doubt that CO2 causes warming. What I don't buy is all the predictions of doom. Nobody knows how climate change will shake out. Generally speaking though, warmer weather is good and cooler weather is bad. Even if we lose some marginal bits of land, I think we'll be better off because the tundra and arctic will warm up and become more useful.

[AAAAAAAAH!]

Why do you believe warmer climates are generally better? Generally the countries further from the equator are better off than the countries closer to it.