IPCC - Warming To Be Far Worse Than Worst-Case Scenarios - Average +3C By 2100 "Extremely Likely"

[hatrack]

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries. 'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

EDIT

To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6C. The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3C hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence. Past assessments by the IPCC have suggested such scenarios are 'likely' to occur this century. Its latest report, based on sophisticated computer models and more detailed observations of snow cover loss, sea level rises and the spread of deserts, is far more robust and confident. Now the panel writes of changes as 'extremely likely' and 'almost certain'.

EDIT

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1995348,00.html

I'm cross-posting this, btw.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Desertification is a real threat

because it will lead to widespread drought and the loss of crops to feed people.

[Moby Grape]

2. How is this known?

remote viewing?
entrails?
tarot?

or something unscientific?

I remember the global cooling scare,
so I am somewhat skeptical.

gotta do more than ....
person a
said person b
said person c
said person d
said something

[GliderGuider]

3. I hear they ask Indian elders

Who count eagle tail feathers.

How does it feel to be as clueless and regurgitative as you appear to be?

[Moby Grape]

4. you are most enlightened

for everyone else,
how about some details

[Moby Grape]

5. do you trust proprietary voting-machine software?

I don't.

I'm kinda tired of the secrecy crapola.

[kestrel91316]

8. It must be fun being one of Rush's paid parrots.

[meow mix]

6. global cooling "scare!"

haha not hard to see where your getting your talking points.
there never was a "scare" other than an obscure, largely unreported idea. calling it that is what youve been directed to do by rightwing commentators.

[kestrel91316]

7. Welcome to DU. Enjoy your stay.

Let's see what a smartaleck you are when you can no longer afford to eat.

[Dogmudgeon]

13. You could check the IPCC's website

Here it is, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They have lots of scientific reports there, complete with Peer Review, Extraordinary Evidence, Falsifiability, and Occam's Razor. Why, even as devout a global warming "skeptic" as Michael Shermer, PhD (philosophy) now believes the scientific work to be solid.

If you remember the "global cooling scare," then you're remembering the non-scientific (i.e., popular press) part of it. Many of the same climatologists, notably Wallace Broecker (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia), were citing the same work -- orbital dynamics, thermohaline currents, glaciation cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide -- and how human activity had been instrumental in atmospheric forcing. In 30 years, the research has confirmed what were once only suspicions.

Everybody wants to be a skeptic, a curmudgeon, an heir to H.L. Mencken and P.T. Barnum. We all want to be the Dangerous Thinker who breaks from the herd of the "sheeple" and becomes the noble target of the Thought Police. But unfortunately, sometimes the prevailing wisdom actually is correct. Human activity is in fact affecting the climate -- strongly. Heat waves and snowstorms may arouse suspicions and wisecracks, but the long-term trends are unmistakable. If the well-supported projections of a 3°C surface-level temperature increase are correct, it will be the biggest climate change in 55 million years. And if the bi-stable model of the climate is correct, it could just as easily take us into an ice age.

None of it is irony. Tragedy is more likely to be the course that history will take.

--p!

[XemaSab]

16. Let's posit a scenario:

The National Weather Service says there's a hurricane coming towards your house, and they give the odds at 1 in 5 that it will smack right into you and destroy your house. Do you evacuate?

It's the same situation here. It's a game of odds, where hey, maybe nothing will happen and we can keep on keepin' on. On the other hand, what if the hurricane is really out there, and by the time it's on top of us it will be too late to evacuate and we're screwed?

[hatrack]

17. It's just two or three thousand of the world's best climate scientists, working for years . . .

. . . following a peer-review process as strenuous as any in the world.

They're called the IPCC - you should learn something about them sometime.

Oh, and of course, their work is in addition to the work of thousands of other atmospheric chemists and atmospheric physicists and climatologists and glaciologists and oceanographers and marine biologists and sedimentologists and limnologists and entomologists and paleoclimatologists and zoologists and the like.

It's called the "scientific literature" - Nature, Science, Geophysical Research Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, etc. - try learning something about it, too, if you have time in your busy schedule.

[Dead_Parrot]

9. A while back, just for fun...

...I plotted our measured emissions against the IPCC's SRES scenario/database chart: Not only are they beyond A1F1, they look to be beyond what the IPCC considered vaguely possible at the time.

Deep Joy.

edit: here we go. The red line is the actual emissions, from NOAA:

[bananas]

10. The red line jumps up and down a lot

Did emissions actually jump up and down that much?
What would the error bars look like?

[Dead_Parrot]

11. That's measured additional CO2

in terms of 1990 levels - the error bars would be pretty small, but there's some variation from weather in there. I didn't want to play around too much with editing the data to smooth it out or add trend lines.

There's also going to be some variation from things like forest fires, but I haven't worked backwards to try and pin reasons to numbers. 1999 seems to have been quite a good year (both on the Mauna Loa and ground-level datasets), but I'll be buggered if I know why... This is the ground-level readings, FWIW.

This way, we get all those positive feedbacks included even if we don't know what they are, which is why I did it in the first place - to see how wrong we'd got it. :D

[GliderGuider]

12. Crap. That's sobering, isn't it?

Looks like we're following the maximum line, or even exceeding it. Just like every other measurement that's been made of related indicators recently. No wonder the glaciers are moving faster than we expected.

[depakid]

14. It damn well is.

What's worse is that the rate of change will exceed most species' ability to adapt.

I figure that we're already well past the tipping point, we just don't know it yet.

[NNadir]

15. This calls out immediately...

for more research.

It also calls for more discussion of how we could someday, say like by 2075, sequester some 5% or more of our carbon.

[Javaman]

18. At the rate Greenlands ice is melting, I think this guy is dreaming if

he thinks that the oceans are only going to rise a half a meter with a +3 temp rise.