Scientists Are Shocked!

[ljgeoff]

Shocked, I say!

Greenhouse gas emissions exceed IPCC's worst case senario.

Corinne Le Quere, professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, said the prediction that current emissions put the planet on track for a temperature rise of more than 11 degrees....

What is "kind of scary" is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.... LA Times 26 September 2008

When your planet's ecosystem is crashing, it's rather silly to say it's like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

Comments

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

When I saw this one about methane in the arctic, It knocked me for a loop. The debate isn't about the chicken littles vs the hypothesis deniars. It's not about Obama vs McCain, or red state vs blue state, or DHS vs fluids, knitting needles and toenail clippers.

Suddenly it's about how much idealism I can afford to hold out, in a world designed for "grab everything as fast as you can".

Livable climate wasn't scarce enough for the market to value it. Now that it's becoming that scarce, the question is if those rich enough to claim responsibility, will also be rich enough to buy their way out of it.

---

I find myself wondering when it was obvious that the Romans were on their way out. Seems like there was about 400 years between the first awareness of unsustainability, and the last pretense of integrity. I think we're closer to 'last pretense' than 'first awareness'.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I posted about methane being one of the 'tip-ups' over here (http://gaiawatch.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/tipups/), at GaiaWatch.

Dr. Le Quere, (which, you know, Dr. Strange...) said, in the article quoted, that even if all emissions were to stop right this minute, the world temperature will still increase by 4 deg. centigrade by the end of this century. And as we are increasing, which, as you know, Bob, is the opposite of decreasing (let alone stopping)... well, I think that the 11 degree forecast is rather optimistic.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I have a suspicion that there's not really a geometric relationship between carbon emissions and temperature: More carbon doesn't directly mean hotter temps, at least where it'll impact us.

I think there's a new stability point with the Earth's climate, where heat will shed at the same rate it's coming in... We just don't know where that new equilibrium will be, or how long it will take to get there.

It's going to be like learning a while new planet. Geography students 10 years from now will be learning different products made by different nations.

I don't want to waste any little bit of the enormous pain this society is going to experience, I want us to learn from *all* of it. This latest financial kerfluffle is peanuts compared to the reality we're going to wake up to.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Around 55 million years ago, our planet experienced a climate change that caused a mass extinction, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Average global temperatures increased by ~6°C in the space of 20,000 years, and resulted in a 35%-50% extinction of sea life, mainly sea life that lived on the ocean floor.

These facts give perspective.

Most scientist agree that the earth will most likely warm by at least 4°C by the end of this century. Add that to the 1°-2°C rise from the last century, and we have a similar climate change, but 100 times faster.

No one knows how this will effect the planet's climate because this has never happened. I'd say that we, as a species, are experiencing the learning curve of the kid who walks out into traffic and gets hit by a Mack truck.

Catastrophizing

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

There's a subtle logical fallacy here that you might want to be careful of.

If this is THE END, then the only people who are able to do anything constructive about it, are the born again Xians who subscribe to the Left behind idea. I don't want to abandon the controversy to the James Watts of the world.

Logically, the only assumption that makes sense to me, is that this is serious enough to put in the forefront, but it's not so serious that anyone gets to panic. I'm trying to use civil energetics as a filter to puzzle out what the best possible form of government can be on this planet, whether that's to prevent future climate erosion, or maximize our survival in the near future. (Either design goal is far from what we've got now.)

There are a zillion different approaches to this. I was just the other day, telling my partners here about your kid's career choice strategy. I can't touch that one, I'm up to my ears in Autism. Likewise, there are lots of other nerds out there, taking their own approach to this.

While it's certainly possible that this stuff is going to be much worse than anyone knows how to handle, and this is the end of the species, that idea isn't really useful. If there's nothing we can do anymore, then we'll find that out when it happens. Meanwhile, I'm keeping busy with the assumption that it all still matters.

Re: Catastrophizing

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

You are right. I get ... caught up, I guess. Lovelock, the gloomiest of the doomsayers, says that he tries to take joy in his day. The beauty of the planet is not diminished, only changed. You are right. It all still matters.