>Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet; and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.
>Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.
>“The western United States once again could suffer perennial droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand.”
>What’s bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. It has beencalculated that a one-degree increase would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100. Again we have seen what this means. There was an incident in the summer of 2005: One tributary fell so low that miles of exposed riverbank dried out into sand dunes, with winds whipping up thick sandstorms. As desperate villagers looked out onto baking mud instead of flowing water, the army was drafted in to ferry precious drinking water up the river – by helicopter, since most of the river was too low to be navigable by boat. The river in question was not some small, insignificant trickle in Sussex. It was the Amazon.
>While tropical lands teeter on the brink, the Arctic already may have passed the point of no return. Warming near the pole is much faster than the global average, with the result that Arctic icecaps and glaciers have lost 400 cubic kilometres of ice in 40 years. Permafrost – ground that has lain frozen for thousands of years – is dissolving into mud and lakes, destabilising whole areas as the ground collapses beneath buildings, roads and pipelines. As polar bears and Inuits are being pushed off the top of the planet, previous predictions are starting to look optimistic. Earlier snowmelt means more summer heat goes into the air and ground rather than into melting snow, raising temperatures in a positive feedback effect. More dark shrubs and forest on formerly bleak tundra means still more heat is absorbed by vegetation.
>Out at sea the pace is even faster. Whilst snow-covered ice reflects more than 80% of the sun’s heat, the darker ocean absorbs up to 95% of solar radiation. Once sea ice begins to melt, in other words, the process becomes self-reinforcing. More ocean surface is revealed, absorbing solar heat, raising temperatures and making it unlikelier that ice will re-form next winter. The disappearance of 720,000 square kilometres of supposedly permanent ice in a single year testifies to the rapidity of planetary change. If you have ever wondered what it will feel like when the Earth crosses a tipping point, savour the moment.
Ethan Johnson
>Mountains, too, are starting to come apart. In the Alps, most ground above 3,000 metres is stabilised by permafrost. In the summer of 2003, however, the melt zone climbed right up to 4,600 metres, higher than the summit of the Matterhorn and nearly as high as Mont Blanc. With the glue of millennia melting away, rocks showered down and 50 climbers died. As temperatures go on edging upwards, it won’t just be mountaineers who flee. Whole towns and villages will be at risk. Some towns, like Pontresina in eastern Switzerland, have already begun building bulwarks against landslides.
>At the opposite end of the scale, low-lying atoll countries such as the Maldives will be preparing for extinction as sea levels rise, and mainland coasts – in particular the eastern US and Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and Pacific islands and the Bay of Bengal – will be hit by stronger and stronger hurricanes as the water warms.
>Most striking of all was seeing how people behaved once the veneer of civilisation had been torn away. Most victims were poor and black, left to fend for themselves as the police either joined in the looting or deserted the area. Four days into the crisis, survivors were packed into the city’s Superdome, living next to overflowing toilets and rotting bodies as gangs of young men with guns seized the only food and water available. Perhaps the most memorable scene was a single military helicopter landing for just a few minutes, its crew flinging food parcels and water bottles out onto the ground before hurriedly taking off again as if from a war zone. In scenes more like a Third World refugee camp than an American urban centre, young men fought for the water as pregnant women and the elderly looked on with nothing. Don’t blame them for behaving like this, I thought. It’s what happens when people are desperate.
Jaxon Hughes
Bunch of liberal bullshit
Jordan Sanders
>Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero.
>BETWEEN ONE AND TWO DEGREES OF WARMING
>At this level, expected within 40 years, the hot European summer of 2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average years, people will die of heat stress.
>The first symptoms may be minor. A person will feel slightly nauseous, dizzy and irritable. It needn’t be an emergency: an hour or so lying down in a cooler area, sipping water, will cure it. But in Paris, August 2003, there were no cooler areas, especially for elderly people.
>Once body temperature reaches 41C (104F) its thermoregulatory system begins to break down. Sweating ceases and breathing becomes shallow and rapid. The pulse quickens, and the victim may lapse into a coma. Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the body’s core temperature, the brain is starved of oxygen and vital organs begin to fail. Death will be only minutes away unless the emergency services can quickly get the victim into intensive care.
Gavin Kelly
>These emergency services failed to save more than 10,000 French in the summer of 2003. Mortuaries ran out of space as hundreds of dead bodies were brought in each night. Across Europe as a whole, the heatwave is believed to have cost between 22,000 and 35,000 lives. Agriculture, too, was devastated. Farmers lost $12 billion worth of crops, and Portugal alone suffered $12 billion of forest-fire damage. The flows of the River Po in Italy, Rhine in Germany and Loire in France all shrank to historic lows. Barges ran aground, and there was not enough water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. Melt rates in the Alps, where some glaciers lost 10% of their mass, were not just a record – they doubled the previous record of 1998. According to the Hadley centre, more than half the European summers by 2040 will be hotter than this. Extreme summers will take a much heavier toll of human life, with body counts likely to reach hundreds of thousands. Crops will bake in the fields, and forests will die off and burn. Even so, the short-term effects may not be the worst:
>From the beech forests of northern Europe to the evergreen oaks of the Mediterranean, plant growth across the whole landmass in 2003 slowed and then stopped. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the stressed plants began to emit it. Around half a billion tonnes of carbon was added to the atmosphere from European plants, equivalent to a twelfth of global emissions from fossil fuels. This is a positive feedback of critical importance, because it suggests that, as temperatures rise, carbon emissions from forests and soils will also rise. If these land-based emissions are sustained over long periods, global warming could spiral out of control.
Asher Campbell
>In the two-degree world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean holidays. The movement of people from northern Europe to the Mediterranean is likely to reverse, switching eventually into a mass scramble as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med. People everywhere will think twice about moving to the coast. When temperatures were last between 1 and 2C higher than they are now, 125,000 years ago, sea levels were five or six metres higher too. All this “lost” water is in the polar ice that is now melting. Forecasters predict that the “tipping point” for Greenland won’t arrive until average temperatures have risen by 2.7C. The snag is that Greenland is warming much faster than the rest of the world – 2.2 times the global average. “Divide one figure by the other,” says Lynas, “and the result should ring alarm bells across the world. Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures rise past a mere 1.2C. The ensuing sea-level ?rise will be far more than the half-metre that ?the IPCC has predicted for the end of the century. Scientists point out that sea levels at the end of the last ice age shot up by a metre every 20 years for four centuries, and that Greenland’s ice, in the words of one glaciologist, is now thinning like mad and flowing much faster than it ought to. Its biggest outflow glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, has thinned by 15 metres every year since 1997, and its speed of flow has doubled. At this rate the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish within 140 years. Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan. Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay and Shanghai would lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move to higher ground.
Adam Morgan
>Not only coastal communities will suffer. As mountains lose their glaciers, so people will lose their water supplies. The entire Indian subcontinent will be fighting for survival. As the glaciers disappear from all but the highest peaks, their runoff will cease to power the massive rivers that deliver vital freshwater to hundreds of millions. Water shortages and famine will be the result, destabilising the entire region. And this time the epicentre of the disaster won’t be India, Nepal or Bangladesh, but nuclear-armed Pakistan.
>Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel as species either migrate or fall out of synch with each other. By the time global temperatures reach two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living species will face extinction.
>Chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming: 93%, but only if emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced by 60% over the next 10 years.
Jason Turner
>BETWEEN TWO AND THREE DEGREES OF WARMING
>Up to this point, assuming that governments have planned carefully and farmers have converted to more appropriate crops, not too many people outside subtropical Africa need have starved. Beyond two degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive.
>To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene – last epoch of the Tertiary period, 3m years ago. There were no continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and sea levels were 25 metres higher than today’s. In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland. The paper spelling it out is the very one whose apocalyptic message so shocked in 2000. Scientists at the Hadley centre feared that earlier climate models, which showed global warming as a straightforward linear progression, were too simplistic in their assumption that land and the oceans would remain inert as their temperatures rose. Correctly as it would turn out, they predicted positive feedback.
>Warmer seas absorb less carbon dioxide, leaving more to accumulate in the atmosphere and intensify global warming. On land, matters would be even worse. Huge amounts of carbon are stored in the soil, the half-rotted remains of dead vegetation. The generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere. As soil warms, bacteria accelerate the breakdown of this stored carbon, releasing it into the atmosphere.
Hudson Morales
>The end of the world is nigh. A three-degree increase in global temperature – possible as early as 2050 – would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another 1.5C. In other words, the Hadley team had discovered that carbon-cycle feedbacks could tip the planet into runaway global warming by the middle of this century – much earlier than anyone had expected.
>Confirmation came from the land itself. Climate models are routinely tested against historical data. In this case, scientists checked 25 years’ worth of soil samples from 6,000 sites across the UK. The result was another black joke. As temperatures gradually rose the scientists found that huge amounts of carbon had been released naturally from the soils. They totted it all up and discovered – irony of ironies – that the 13m tonnes of carbon British soils were emitting annually was enough to wipe out all the country’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.” All soils will be affected by the rising heat, but none as badly as the Amazon’s. “Catastrophe” is almost too small a word for the loss of the rainforest. Its 7m square kilometres produce 10% of the world’s entire photosynthetic output from plants. Drought and heat will cripple it; fire will finish it off. In human terms, the effect on the planet will be like cutting off oxygen during an asthma attack.
Gabriel Davis
>In the US and Australia, people will curse the climate-denying governments of Bush and Howard. No matter what later administrations may do, it will not be enough to keep the mercury down. With new “super-hurricanes” growing from the warming sea, Houston could be destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. “Farming and food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs. In state capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000 mainly elderly people.
>It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In Central America, too, tens of millions will have little to put on their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds of thousands had to rely on food aid. This won’t be an option when world supplies are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by 10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero). Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at the first spark.
>The Indian subcontinent meanwhile will be choking on dust. All of human history shows that, given the choice between starving in situ and moving, people move. In the latter part of the century tens of millions of Pakistani citizens may be facing this choice. Pakistan may find itself joining the growing list of failed states, as civil administration collapses and armed gangs seize what little food is left.
Christian Smith
Don't believe their lies
Michael Hall
>As the land burns, so the sea will go on rising. Even by the most optimistic calculation, 80% of Arctic sea ice by now will be gone, and the rest will soon follow. New York will flood; the catastrophe that struck eastern England in 1953 will become an unremarkable regular event; and the map of the Netherlands will be torn up by the North Sea. Everywhere, starving people will be on the move – from Central America into Mexico and the US, and from Africa into Europe, where resurgent fascist parties will win votes by promising to keep them out.
>Chance of avoiding three degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches two degrees and triggers carbon-cycle feedbacks from soils and plants.
Caleb Cruz
>BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING
>The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to safer interiors – millions at a time when storms hit. Where they persist, coastal cities will become fortified islands. The world economy, too, will be threadbare. As direct losses, social instability and insurance payouts cascade through the system, the funds to support displaced people will be increasingly scarce. Sea levels will be rampaging upwards – in this temperature range, both poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 metres. “I am not suggesting it would be instantaneous. In fact it would take centuries, and probably millennia, to melt all of the Antarctic’s ice. But it could yield sea-level rises of a metre or so every 20 years – far beyond our capacity to adapt.Oxford would sit on one of many coastlines in a UK reduced to an archipelago of tiny islands.
>More immediately, China is on a collision course with the planet. By 2030, if its people are consuming at the same rate as Americans, they will eat two-thirds of the entire global harvest and burn 100m barrels of oil a day, or 125% of current world output. That prospect alone contains all the ingredients of catastrophe. But it’s worse than that: “By the latter third of the 21st century, if global temperatures are more than three degrees higher than now, China’s agricultural production will crash. It will face the task of feeding 1.5bn much richer people – 200m more than now – on two thirds of current supplies.” For people throughout much of the world, starvation will be a regular threat; but it will not be the only one.
Nolan Sanchez
>The summer will get longer still, as soaring temperatures reduce forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures in the Home Counties could reach 45C – the sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs.
>Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool. This in turn will put ever more stress on energy systems, which could pour more greenhouse gases into the air if coal and gas-fired power stations ramp up their output, hydroelectric sources dwindle and renewables fail to take up the slack. The abandonment of the Mediterranean will send even more people north to “overcrowded refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles.
>Britain will have problems of its own. As flood plains are more regularly inundated, a general retreat out of high risk areas is likely. Millions of people will lose their lifetime investments in houses that become uninsurable and therefore unsaleable? The Lancashire/Humber corridor is expected to be among the worst affected regions, as are the Thames Valley, eastern Devon and towns around the already flood-prone Severn estuary like Monmouth and Bristol. The entire English coast from the Isle of Wight to Middlesbrough is classified as at ‘very high’ or ‘extreme’ risk, as is the whole of Cardigan Bay in Wales.
Julian Long
Humanity must revert to natural lifestyle.
It is up to us - the educated, the intelligent - to guide those ignorant on the right path.
Participate, educate, argue, manipulate if need be, do anything to change the status quo.
If we fail today there will be no tomorrow.
Robert Brown
>One of the most dangerous of all feedbacks will now be kicking in – the runaway thaw of permafrost. Scientists believe at least 500 billion tonnes of carbon are waiting to be released from the Arctic ice, though none yet has put a figure on what it will add to global warming. One degree? Two? Three? The pointers are ominous.
>As with Amazon collapse and the carbon-cycle feedback in the three-degree worldstabilising global temperatures at four degrees above current levels may not be possible. If we reach three degrees, therefore, that leads inexorably to four degrees, which leads inexorably to five?
>Chance of avoiding four degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches three degrees and triggers a runaway thaw of permafrost.
Owen Bailey
>BETWEEN FOUR AND FIVE DEGREES OF WARMING
>We are looking now at an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. One temptation may be to shift populations from dry areas to the newly thawed regions of the far north, in Canada and Siberia. Even here, though, summers may be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts; and there is no guarantee that northern governments will admit southern refugees. Lynas recalls James Lovelock’s suspicion that Siberia and Canada would be invaded by China and the US, each hammering another nail into humanity’s coffin. Any armed conflict, particularly involving nuclear weapons, would of course further increase the planetary surface area uninhabitable for humans.
>When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago, following a very sudden burst of global warming in the early Eocene, alligators and other subtropical species were living high in the Arctic. What had caused the climate to flip? Suspicion rests on methane hydrate – “an ice-like combination of methane and water that forms under the intense cold and pressure of the deep sea”, and which escapes with explosive force when tapped. Evidence of a submarine landslide off Florida, and of huge volcanic eruptions under the North Atlantic, raises the possibility of trapped methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – being released in a giant belch that pushed global temperatures through the roof.
Angel Johnson
>Summer heatwaves scorched the vegetation out of continental Spain, leaving a desert terrain which was heavily eroded by winter rainstorms. Palm mangroves grew as far north as England and Belgium, and the Arctic Ocean was so warm that Mediterranean algae thrived. In short, it was a world much like the one we are heading into this century. Although the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, as scientists call it, was more than today’s, the rate of increase in the 21st century may be 30 times faster. It may well be the fastest increase the world has ever seen – faster even than the episodes that caused catastrophic mass extinctions.
>Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the few remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.
Ethan Thompson
>Where no refuge is available, civil war and a collapse into racial or communal conflict seems the likely outcome. Isolated survivalism, however, may be as impracticable as dialling for room service. How many of us could really trap or kill enough game to feed a family? Even if large numbers of people did successfully manage to fan out into the countryside, wildlife populations would quickly dwindle under the pressure. Supporting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle takes 10 to 100 times the land per person that a settled agricultural community needs. A large-scale resort to survivalism would turn into a further disaster for biodiversity as hungry humans killed and ate anything that moved. Including, perhaps, each other. Invaders do not take kindly to residents denying them food. History suggests that if a stockpile is discovered, the householder and his family may be tortured and killed. Look for comparison to the experience of present-day Somalia, Sudan or Burundi, where conflicts over scarce land and food are at the root of lingering tribal wars and state collapse.
>Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea bed.
Jacob Martinez
>BETWEEN FIVE AND SIX DEGREES OF WARMING
>Although warming on this scale lies within the IPCC’s officially endorsed range of 21st-century possibilities, climate models have little to say about what Lynas, echoing Dante, describes as “the Sixth Circle of Hell”. To see the most recent climatic lookalike, we have to turn the geological clock back between 144m and 65m years, to the Cretaceous, which ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an even closer fit at the end of the Permian, 251m years ago, when global temperatures rose by – yes – six degrees, and 95% of species were wiped out.
>That episode was the worst ever endured by life on Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and desolate rock in space.” On land, the only winners were fungi that flourished on dying trees and shrubs. At sea there were only losers. Warm water is a killer. Less oxygen can dissolve, so conditions become stagnant and anoxic. Oxygen-breathing water-dwellers – all the higher forms of life from plankton to sharks – face suffocation. Warm water also expands, and sea levels rose by 20 metres.” The resulting “super-hurricanes” hitting the coasts would have triggered flash floods that no living thing could have survived.
Parker Turner
>There are aspects of the so-called “end-Permian extinction” that are unlikely to recur – most importantly, the vast volcanic eruption in Siberia that spread magma hundreds of metres thick over an area bigger than western Europe and shot billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. That is small comfort, however, for beneath the oceans, another monster stirred – the same that would bring a devastating end to the Palaeocene nearly 200m years later, and that still lies in wait today. Methane hydrate.
>What happens when warming water releases pent-up gas from the sea bed: First, a small disturbance drives a gas-saturated parcel of water upwards. As it rises, bubbles begin to appear, as dissolved gas fizzles out with reducing pressure – just as a bottle of lemonade overflows if the top is taken off too quickly. These bubbles make the parcel of water still more buoyant, accelerating its rise through the water. As it surges upwards, reaching explosive force, it drags surrounding water up with it. At the surface, water is shot hundreds of metres into the air as the released gas blasts into the atmosphere. Shockwaves propagate outwards in all directions, triggering more eruptions nearby.
Liam Barnes
>The eruption is more than just another positive feedback in the quickening process of global warming. Unlike CO2, methane is flammable. Even in air-methane concentrations as low as 5%, the mixture could ignite from lightning or some other spark and send fireballs tearing across the sky. The effect would be much like that of the fuel-air explosives used by the US and Russian armies – so-called “vacuum bombs” that ignite fuel droplets above a target. According to the CIA, those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringes are likely to suffer many internal injuries, including burst eardrums, severe concussion, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness.” Such tactical weapons, however, are squibs when set against methane-air clouds from oceanic eruptions. Scientists calculate that they could “destroy terrestrial life almost entirely (251m years ago, only one large land animal, the pig-like lystrosaurus, survived). It has been estimated that a large eruption in future could release energy equivalent to 108 megatonnes of TNT – 100,000 times more than the world’s entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. Not even Lynas, for all his scientific propriety, can avoid the Hollywood ending. “It is not too difficult to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions near large population centres wiping out billions of people – perhaps in days. Imagine a ‘fuel-air explosive’ fireball racing towards a city – London, say, or Tokyo – the blast wave spreading out from the explosive centre with the speed and force of an atomic bomb. Buildings are flattened, people are incinerated where they stand, or left blind and deaf by the force of the explosion. Mix Hiroshima with post-Katrina New Orleans to get some idea of what such a catastrophe might look like: burnt survivors battling over food, wandering far and wide from empty cities.
Jackson Reed
>Then would come hydrogen sulphide from the stagnant oceans. “It would be a silent killer: imagine the scene at Bhopal following the Union Carbide gas release in 1984, replayed first at coastal settlements, then continental interiors across the world. At the same time, as the ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun’s rays burning into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived. Dante’s hell was a place of judgment, where humanity was for ever punished for its sins. With all the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people, livestock and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of burning fossil energy.
>Q1: Is there really a scientific consensus on global warming?
>A1: Yes. The IPCC findings of recent warming as a result of human influence are explicitly recognized as the "consensus" scientific view by the science academies of all the major industrialized countries. No scientific body of national or international standing presently rejects the basic findings of human influence on recent climate. This scientific consensus is supported by 97% of publishing climate scientists.[1][2]
Evan Collins
>Q2: How can you say there's a consensus when someone has compiled a long list of "skeptical" scientists?
>A2: Consensus is not the same as unanimity, the latter of which is impractical for large groups. Roughly 97% of publishing climate scientists agree on anthropogenic climate change.[2] This is an extremely high percentage well past any reasonable threshold for consensus. Any list of "skeptical scientists" would be dwarfed by a comparably-compiled list of scientists accepting anthropogenic climate change.
>Some lists of "skeptical scientists" have been widely shared with the intention of undermining the public's confidence in the scientific conclusions. Notable among them are the Oregon Petition (circa 1999–2001, and re-circulated in 2007) and James Inhofe's list (originally released in 2007, re-released in 2008 with additional names added). These petitions have proven to be riddled with flaws:[3]
>Many of the people listed aren't really scientists. For example, the definition of a "scientist" used in the Oregon Petition includes anyone who has a bachelor's degree – or anyone who claims to have a bachelor's degree, since there's no independent verification. Using this definition, approximately 25% of the US population is qualified to sign.
>Some of the people listed aren't even people. Included on these lists are hoaxes ("Dr. Geri Halliwell") and companies.
>Of those who have a scientific background most work in fields unrelated to climate, such as the chemistry of coal ashes[4] or the interactions between quarks and gluons.
Parker Bailey
>Those who are scientists are listed arbitrarily, and includes people who say they aren't skeptical of global warming. The Inhofe list was compiled by Inhofe staffer Marc Morano with no effort to contact the people listed. One of those on the list, George Waldenberger, even informed Inhofe's staff that he is not skeptical of the consensus on global warming. His request to have his name removed from the list was ignored.[5] Similarly, Steve Rayner of Oxford University has asked for his name to be removed and calls his inclusion "quite outrageous".[6] The Heartland Institute has stated that scientists who have told the Institute that it misrepresented their views on global warming "have no right – legally or ethically – to demand that their names be removed" from the Institute's list.
>Wikipedia itself maintains a list of notable scientists who oppose the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming but it helps to keep its minority viewpoint in mind when reading it.
Brayden Bailey
>Q3: Did global warming end in 1998?[hide]
>A3: One of the strongest El Niño events in the instrumental record occurred during late 1997 through 1998, causing a spike in global temperature for 1998. Through the mid-late 2000s this abnormally warm year could be chosen as the starting point for comparisons with later years in order to produce a cooling trend; choosing any other year in the 20th century produced a warming trend. This no longer holds since the mean global temperatures in 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2016 have all been warmer than 1998.[7]
>More importantly, scientists do not define a "trend" by looking at the difference between two given years. Instead they use methods such as linear regression that take into account all the values in a series of data. The World Meteorological Organisation specifies 30 years as the standard averaging period for climate statistics so that year-to-year fluctuations are averaged out;[8] thus, 10 years isn't long enough to detect a climate trend.
>In a BBC interview on 13 February 2010, Phil Jones agreed that from 1995 to 2009, the global warming "trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level", though close.[9] This has been misleadingly reported by some news sources.[10] On 10 June 2011 Jones told the BBC that the trend over the period 1995 to 2010 had reached the 95% significance level traditionally used as a threshold by statisticians.[11]
Charles Foster
>Q4: How can we say global warming is real when it's been so cold in such-and-such a place?
>A4: This is why it is termed "global warming", not "(such-and-such a place) warming". Even then, what rises is the average temperature over time - that is, the temperature will fluctuate up and down within the overall rising trend. To give an idea of the relevant time scales, the standard averaging period specified by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is 30 years. Accordingly, the WMO defines climate change as "a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer)."[12]
Hudson Morales
>Q5: Can't the increase of CO2 be from natural sources, like volcanoes or the oceans?
>A5: While these claims are popular among global warming skeptics,[13][14][15] including academically-trained ones,[16][17] they are incorrect. This is known from any of several perspectives:
>Current human emissions of CO2 are at least 100 times larger than volcanic emissions. Measurements of CO2 levels over the past 50 years do not show any significant rises after eruptions.[18] This is easily seen in a graph of CO2 concentrations over the past 50 years: the strongest eruption during the period, that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, produced no increase in the trend.
>Isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide shows the observed change in the ratio of carbon isotopes reflects the isotopic ratios in fossil fuels.[19]
>Atmospheric oxygen content is decreasing at a rate that agrees with the amount of oxygen being used to burn fossil fuels.[20]
>If the oceans were giving up some of their carbon dioxide, their carbon dioxide concentration would have to decrease. But instead we are measuring an increase in the oceans' carbon dioxide concentration, resulting in the oceans becoming more acidic (or more accurately, less basic).[21]
Oliver Gray
>Q8: Isn't global warming "just a theory"?
>A8: No. People who say this are abusing the word "theory" by conflating its common meaning with its scientific meaning. In common usage, "theory" can mean a hunch or guess but a scientific theory, roughly-speaking, means a coherent set of explanations that is compatible with observations and that allows predictions to be made. That the temperature is rising is an observation. An explanation for this (also known as a hypothesis) is that the warming is primarily driven by greenhouse gases (such as CO2 and methane) released into the atmosphere by human activity. Scientific models have been built that predict the rise in temperature and these predictions have matched observations. When scientists gain confidence in a hypothesis because it matches observation and has survived intense scrutiny, the hypothesis may be called a "theory". Strictly speaking, scientific theories are never proven but the degree of confidence in a theory can be discussed. The scientific models now suggest that it is "extremely likely" (>95%) to "virtually certain" (>99%) that the increases in temperature have been caused by human activity as discussed in the latest IPCC report. Global warming via greenhouse gases by human activity is a theory (in the scientific sense) but it is most definitely not just a hunch or guess.
Jose Smith
>Q10: Wasn't Greenland much warmer during the period of Norse settlement?
>A10: Some people assume this because of the island's name. In fact the Saga of Erik the Red tells us Erik named the new colony Greenland because "men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name."[23] Advertising hype was alive and well in 985 AD.
>While much of Greenland was and remains under a large ice shelf, the areas of Greenland that were settled by the Norse were coastal areas with fjords that, to this day, remain quite green. You can see the following images for reference: >A map of the Eastern Settlement [1] >A satellite image of that area today [2] >A map of the Western Settlement [3] >A satellite image of that area today [4] >A zoom in on the general area where the Brattahlid (Erik the Red's farm) and Gardar farms were located [5]
Charles Gomez
>Q11: Are the IPCC reports prepared by biased UN scientists?
>A11: The IPCC reports are not produced by "UN scientists". The IPCC does not employ the scientists who generate the reports, and has no control over them. The scientists are internationally recognized experts, most with a long history of successful research in the field. They are employed by various organizations including scientific research institutes, agencies like NASA and NOAA, and universities. They receive no extra pay for their participation in the IPCC process, which is considered a normal part of their academic duties.
>Q12: Hasn't global sea ice increased over the last 30 years?
>A12: Measurements show that it has not.[24] Claims that global sea ice has stayed the same or increased are a result of cherry picking two data points to compare, while ignoring the real (strongly statistically significant) downward trend in measurements of global sea ice.
>Q13: Weren't scientists telling us in the 1970s that we were cooling instead of warming?
>A13: They weren't – see the article on global cooling. An article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has reviewed the scientific literature at that time, and found that even during the 1970s the prevailing scientific concern was over warming.[25] The common misperception that cooling was the main concern during the 1970s arose from a few studies that were sensationalized in the popular press. (Newsweek eventually apologized for having misrepresented the state of the science in the 1970s.)
Oliver Morales
>Q14: Doesn't water vapor cause 98% of the greenhouse effect?
>A14: Water vapour is indeed a major greenhouse gas, contributing about 36% to 70% (not 98%) of the total greenhouse effect. But water vapour has a very short atmospheric lifetime (about 10 days), compared with decades to centuries for greenhouse gases like CO2 or nitrous oxide. As a result it is very nearly in a dynamic equilibrium in the atmosphere, which globally maintains a nearly constant relative humidity. In simpler terms any excess water vapor is removed by rainfall while any deficit of water vapor is replenished by evaporation from Earth's surface. Thus water vapor cannot act as a driver of climate change.
>Rising temperatures caused by the long-lived greenhouse gases will allow the atmosphere to hold more vapor. This leads to an increase in the absolute amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. Since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas this is an example of a positive feedback. Thus, while water vapour is not a driver of climate change, it amplifies existing trends.
Jackson Brown
>Q17: Doesn't the climate vary even without human activity?
>A17: It does but the fact that natural variation occurs does not mean that human-induced change cannot also occur. Climate scientists have extensively studied natural causes of climate change (such as orbital changes, volcanism, and solar variation) and have ruled them out as an explanation for the current temperature increase. Human activity is the cause at the 95 to 99 percent confidence level (see latest IPCC report for details). The high level of certainty in this is important to keep in mind to spot mention of natural variation functioning as a distraction.
Brayden Hughes
>Q19: Is an increase in global temperature of, say, 6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 degrees Celsius) important?
>A19: Though it may not sound like much, a global temperature rise of 6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 degrees Celsius) is huge in climate terms. For example, the sea level rise it would produce would flood coastal cities around the world.
>Earth climate has varied significantly over geological ages. The question of an "optimal temperature" makes no sense without a clear optimality criterion. Over geological time spans, ecosystems adapt to climate variations. But global climate variations during the development of human civilization (i.e., the past 12,000 years) have been remarkably small. Human civilization is highly adapted to the current stable climate. Agricultural production depends on the proper combination of soil, climate, methods, and seeds. Most large cities are located on the coast, and any significant change in sea level would strongly affect them. Migration of humans and ecosystems is limited by political borders and existing land use. In short, the main problem is not the absolute temperature, but the massive and unprecedentedly fast change in climate, and the related effects to human societies. The IPCC AR4 WG2 report has a detailed discussion of the effects of rapid climate change.[35]
Camden Nguyen
>What’s bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. It amazes me that blue-pilled so-called scientists can write a statement like this and still not understand it.
THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT OF CLIMATE CHANGE
The world is "overpopulated" and the elite's solution to this has been 1) create a mudrace of brainlets that are easily controlled and 2) kill a ton of people. No one gives a shit. If you fix climate change, they'll use their 23&me database to engineer a superbug. If that's blocked they'll have an asteroid mining "accident" while they're conveniently vacationing on the moon. So long as our elected officials ensure we are all born in debt by deficit spending out of retarded "compassion" we will always be beholden to the elites and they can continue to use our lives and our planet as their personal playground.
And as usual there retarded response is "we" just have to spend more money to combat this... Who the fuck do you think is "we"?
Oliver Bennett
The next generations will bare the full brunt of our mistakes, and there's nothing we can do
Kayden Kelly
Hi brainlet here. Why do we give a shit about ice caps? They're a temporary feature are they not?
Jason Sanchez
Read the damn thing and you will understand.
Colton Diaz
He is John G. KILL HIM
Camden Perry
Right but the ice caps are what, 2.6 million years old? Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Life it self is 3.7 billion years old. So what does the loss of a momentary feature have to do with anything? So what if the sea levels rise? We're the dumbasses who built those cities by inopportune places.
Samuel Lewis
Losing them all at once would be very damaging. These changes usually happen over the course of thousands of years, not decades.
Dominic Torres
>So what does the loss of a momentary feature have to do with anything?
>So what if the sea levels rise? You're an imbecile.
Zachary Watson
Gradual change can be adapted to. Sudden change can't. Guess which category a century-long loss of ice caps would fall under.
Christopher Ramirez
These are some epic manntastic lies. Also good job pasting with zero input of yourself, brainlet. Take this one. Climate scientists just love dramatizing while their colleagues in real fields are baffled to encounter results that are completely contrary to the climate swindle. sciencenordic.com/vikings-grew-barley-greenland
Josiah Perry
medieval warm period isnhotly debated it's only based on diaries and shit like that not geochemical data
anyone who was delusional enough to think humanity will survive past this century should be getting their wake up call soon.
Elijah Cooper
Oh, humanity will survive just fine. If you're part of the 0.01 percent that is.
Chase Bell
>people with 0 life skills will survive lmao okay, maybe for their lifetime and that's it.
Angel Parker
Even if somehow our energy resources don't go (it will for a lot of places), those living on the coasts will be the first to get fucked, they'll have no chance. Maybe the wealthy can move to a more secure place with steady renewables that's far from the coast before shit hits the fan, but once it does there's not much they can do.
Luis Howard
>Acid rain will end our civizilation >The ozone layer is being destroyed will end our civilization >We're going into a new ice age and it will end our civilization >We're going to run out of oil by 1980/90/00/10/20/etc and it's going to end our civilization >Y2K is going to end our civilization >The earth has been literally 10 full degrees warmer at times and life was not only sustained, but prospering, but this time, it's definitely going to destroy our civilization, trust us! This is why that "consensus" doesn't mean shit liberals. You've played this hand so many times it's just sad.
Michael Myers
won't global warming stop global warming? like if billions of shitskins die won't the need for processes which exacerbate global warming dramatically decline?
coupled with exponential growth of technology in fields where there is a low fiscal/material investment, e.g A.I, global warming might be a good thing for whitey
Luke Davis
>won't global warming stop global warming? >global warming might be a good thing for whitey
Caleb Campbell
>Right but the ice caps are what, 2.6 million years old? >Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Life it self is 3.7 billion years old. We're not "life". Human civilisation is only a few thousand years old, and we've been living in a period of considerable stability. Rapid climate changes are incredibly dangerous to us.
>These are some epic manntastic lies. Wow, amazing! You don't like a field of science, and suddenly all the it's conclusions are lies. I'm impressed.
>Climate people have put in great effort to minimize or even efface the MWP since it is invonvenient in their theoretical framework. They're not trying to "minimise it" - it just wasn't ever very large. The MWP was a short, regional warm period. It shows up strongly on Greenland data, weakly on northern hemisphere records, and barely or not at all on global records.
It's incredible that you can bring up all those topics, and yet fail to recall exactly what experts said about any of them.
Easton Peterson
Good, just find something cold.
Christopher Brown
Honestly, ignore politics. Just do things. Get things done. There's no way we can solve this by trying to convince people with words. Action is the only thing that can solve it
Daniel Thompson
It’s also worth noticing who the compassion spending goes to. (Dictators who do what the elite want, and charity organisations that pay these people and are a great way of laundering money and hiding bribery as d’nations.)
Dominic Hill
Do you watch DrDeepstate?
Ian Smith
wtf i love global warming now
Nathaniel Young
>he acutally fucking linked a prageru video
Joshua Williams
This is why Veeky Forums is one of the worst boards, fucking weirdos with a complex like you.
Elijah Reed
The solution is to reduce the human population by 75%.
Someone make a virus already.
Jack Stewart
Holy shit, you're not from around here are you? You just linked a channel dedicated to guiding brainlets into being useful idiots. Congrats, you're officially a useful idiot.
Dominic Bennett
found the /pol/itard
Chase Carter
Didn't they say the ice caps would have melted by 2015? lol
Juan Bailey
Or just let it happen and it will do that anyway?
Jackson Perry
Congrats, you did not even have a glance at the links provided while not even providing a real argument yourself. You made a complete ass of yourself.
Grayson Allen
Arctic ice minimum crashed in almost half in 2006, and it hasn't improved since. But hey, keep on being Putin's little useful idiot.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the last time the earth was more than 2 degrees warmer than now was the fucking Pliocene? >hurr durr conditions were different in a completely different epoch
>and not even a trace of reality or logic was seen
Christopher Lee
What the fuck is wrong with conservatives
Asher Long
I still can't believe this buffoon is president.
Ayden Carter
Well, people tend to get the government they deserve.
Jayden Thomas
Just remember that americans are incredibly dumb and it makes sense
Jaxon Anderson
fucking hell you boomer shrill
Christopher Murphy
so who unironically wants to build a huge nuclear powered bunker somewhere. we will use a thorium reactor and we will factory farms to sustain us. We can hopefully beable to grow meet using gmo technology. It honestly seems like the only way foward at this point
Benjamin Mitchell
Nice false flag, faggot. Good. If we kill the earth we have no choice but to colonize space or die. You know it's never going to happen any other way.
Cameron Long
You mean what the fuck is wrong with a false dichotomy political spectrum composed of arbitrarily mixed stances. Nowadays you can either acknowledge climate change or racial differences but not both, apparently. Yet the brainlets on both sides will vehemently deny facts just because the other side is using them.
Logan Adams
>implying it is 100% human's fault AND irreversible Climate scientists can't even predict the weather. So why bother listening to their fabricated models?
Ayden Cruz
W A R A C E
Joseph Morris
Yes, we should've killed all white males and opened borders.
Carter Cox
Who are you quoting?
Jaxson Gonzalez
Not all conservatives take ignorant, short-sighted stances when confronted with complex issues. But how many of those 20,000 Likes do you think came from liberals?
The fact that /pol/ is like 95% right-wing, and roughly the same proportion agree with Trump 100% of the time, doesn't help.
Not voting for Trump=supporting white genocide. Why don't all scientists just move to Nigeria if they hate white people so much? > all white people should speak english
Brandon Bennett
That guy was memeing; the first guy was not.
Luke Jackson
I am not.
Jaxson Torres
Humans are only 300,000 years old, a momentary feature if you will. Clearly we should not care about humanity surviving.
Leo Richardson
Of course you would deny the truth when confronted - as expected of a Democrat!
Luis Lee
This explanation is on par to creationist logic. Pretty bad. And that's ignoring the wrong parts.
Colton Miller
Repeat after me: Technology is Progress!
Juan Gomez
Weird how a video whose entire premise is that the models have failed shows zero models. In reality, the models have done very well:
So this begs the question, is the scientist in the video lying about being an expert and simply mistaken about the models, or is he an expert lying about the models?
Jayden Davis
We have the technology to adapt to climate change. It's called nuclear and renewable energy. The problem is not that we are waiting for technology, the problem is that you idiots are denying the problem exists and preventing the solution from being implemented.
