Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@BSoG: Even then Muslims living in India have higher fertility rate than those in Pakistan. Fertility rate of Muslims in India is 3.2 children per woman which is way over the fertility rate in India which stands at 2.4 and also above global Muslim fertility rate of 3.1, which is the highest of any religion- Way above replacement level (2.1), the minimum typically needed to maintain steady growing population.

So much so that there will be more Muslims living in India than the entire population of Pakistan by 2050, making India, rather than Indonesia, the country with highest muslim population, according to Pew Research.

jacob wrote: Both nations are nuclear armed and can easily destroy each other making for a highly dynamic edge. Additionally, it's my understanding that these nations don't really like each other.

That nuclear exchange might be enough to counteract all of the human-caused global warming, according to an article I read in Scientific American a few years ago. They weren't endorsing the idea, they just mentioned it. I think the article was more along the lines of what some of the technological attempts to keep the planet cooler might look like.

Nuclear winter only "works" for about a decade (because soot---even radioactive soot---eventually rains out) and would risk losing the annual harvest several years in a row.

This would be extremely hard to prep for (several years worth of food that your neighbours or government aren't gonna take away from you). The world's food reserve is practically nil (equal to whatever currently resides in trucks and on supermarket shelves). Therefore, the world powers (Russia, China, US) will probably go to great length to avoid such an exchange.

More detail:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 090729.htm

The "best" shot at engineering is this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphe ... neering%29

Such a scenario is cheap enough for practically all nations or larger corporations to rougely commit on their own via bulk (order on e.g. amazon ) launching of weather balloons---hence practically impossible to stop too. Sulfate rains out within a few years, so this would require an ongoing effort. Note that industrial pollution already contributes about -80 ppm CO2e (e for equivalent) which just about cancels out the effects of all the other green house gases (methane, halo carbons, nitrous oxide). Hence, ironically, if we were to "go green" and stop polluting then within a few years we would commit to at least the 3C track with concentrations jumping from the current 400 ppm CO2e to 480 ppm CO2e.

The "good news" is that if the world commits to this plan, it does not require any kind of high tech. It does require enough global stability to maintain this program for many centuries (1000+ years). No need to prep as the implementation would be on our grand/children and subsequent generations for a long long loooooong time. In a way, this long term problem is similar to the nuclear waste problem.

Jacob,

I'm curious on your take about the modifications on the temperature data. There have been numerous modifications to the data the global warming models are based on and most (all?) of the changes reinforce the global warming storyline. Just recently they modified the data again and are now claiming there has been no "pause" in the global warming trend. It is a very powerful argument for the skeptics that the data is being manipulated and there is not a lot of public information about how and why the data has been adjusted.

There are several points here. It's really off topic for this thread [about impacts], but I'll respond to them briefly, so we can bury this one quickly and permanently.

Contrary to what you assert, if you took the unadjusted data, you'd find that the temperature rise in the raw data would be 0.5C higher than the adjusted data. Adjusting the data thus reinforces the skeptical storyline!

Adjusting data is important since we're dealing with more than a century of weather station data some of which have physically moved, changed their instrumentation, been subjected to urban heat island effects, etc. This is why the data is being adjusted.

The general methodology as well as the raw data is publicly available for anyone who cares to google it and educate themselves.

If you want to go into details, the paper with the new results describing how the data was adjusted is also publicly available!

In short, there's pretty much enough public information and data available for a lifetime of study.

Note that this is but one paper/study which the media and the denialists are blowing out of proportion and we, as good scientists, should not immediately fall prey to the "this changes everything"-syndrome whenever a new paper is published but put it in its proper perspective. In fact, as I shall now show, this paper is not very revolutionary.

Putting things in context (which the public is prone not to do, a fact which denialists take full advantage of) makes it pretty clear that the hiatus argument was rather specious in the first place. Thus all this paper does is to refute a weak denialist argument.

Why was it weak?

First, the hiatus was only seen in surface temperature data. However, if you look at total temperature data (surface+ocean+atmosphere) which is a better indicator of the global energy balance, there never was any hiatus. If you look at any of the other trending indicators like precipitation, ice cover, ocean acidity, etc. there wasn't any hiatus either. Hence, if you only see a possible break in one indicator while all the other ones are still trending, what would you expect?

Second, from the scientific side, the hiatus or more accurately a decrease in the trend line (i.e. 'still getting worse, just not as fast as before'---which is quite different from 'getting better again') was mostly interesting in terms of understanding why the surface temperature was deviating from the other indicators. This was found to be due to changes in the ocean circulation as described in AR5.

The denialist argument for the pause was to cherrypick 1998, which was a strong El Nino year as the baseline, and claim that since annual surface temperatures hadn't exceed the 1998 value, global warming had paused. This argument worked on the public because the public likes soundbytes and slogans "No warming in 15 years!" more than they bother to actually look at the data.

And here's the graph ...



From which it's blatantly obvious that 1998 was an outlier and the trend was still there post-1998 even though it got weaker (as correctly noted and studied by the scientists). Even an idiot can see that if you picked 1997 or 1999 or 1996 or 2000 or ... any other bloody year WHATSOEVER, the whole pause argument dies.

However, denialists disingeniously misused the 1998 outlier while relying on the public not to actually look at the data itself in order to create the pause slogan. And in that they were successful. Because as Lincoln correctly observed, "you can fool some of the people all of the time" which obviously is easy when the fools never bother to look at the data.

Of course with 2014 breaking the 1998 record, that means that the slogan didn't make it to "No warming in 16 years"

Thanks for the links! I've got some reading to do. One concern with your graph is that it can be viewed the same way as you complain about skeptics' viewpoints. Most of the concern about corrections (at least the limited number that I am aware of!) has to do with longer timelines. Typical is to show the IPCC 1990 graph vs the 2001 graph. This history is why there is so much skepticism about any corrections being applied.

Just for full disclosure--I don't doubt that we are having climate change and that humans create some of it. I'm less sure about the magnitude of purely human effect and even more unsure about the heavy weight given to CO2--my small amount of reading on this makes me look much more at deforestation in the southern continents. I also think that there is an agenda of those on both sides to play up or down the effect of CO2 depending on their political outlook and that neither side's actions are really about global warming. One of the nice things about my coming retirement this year will be having time to dig into the real data on the issue.

Science (published, peer-reviewed) states that with 95-100% probability that MOST of the temperature rise over the past 50 years is attributed to human CO2 emissions. Statistically speaking, that's now a stronger statement than the connection between smoking and lung cancer. This means that NOBODY has been able to explain EVEN A TINY BIT of the temperature rise without including the human contribution. See,
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_dat ... g-and.html

About 2/3 of CO2 emissions come from burning fossil fuels. The other 1/3 comes from changes in land use like farming but primarily deforestation. This source attribution is a matter of mere accounting and hardly up for discussion. See,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributio ... e#Land_use

Despite water vapor being the strongest absorber of radiative heat, CO2 is the most important green house gas because it persists in the atmosphere and sets the baseline temperature balance unlike water vapor which adjusts its equilibrium very quickly in the form of rain. This very basic fact about atmospheric science has been understood for more than 150 years since Tyndall discovered the connection in 1859. In fact, here's an excerpt from a popular general science book from 1904 when the relevance of CO2 was basic common knowledge:

Carbon Dioxide and Climate.—The atmosphere surrounding the earth may be compared with the glass of a greenhouse, which permits the bright rays of the sun to pass through, but prevents the escape of the dull radiations from the heated surfaces below it. This action is due to the carbon dioxide and water vapour in the air; but as the proportion of the latter varies very considerably, while the quantity of the former is almost the same in the open air everywhere at all seasons, evidently the protective action of carbon dioxide gas is of prime importance. If the proportion of this gas in the atmosphere could be increased, the temperature of the ground and of the air surrounding us would be raised, and if it were to be diminished all parts of the earth would become cooler. This conclusion appears astonishing when the small concentration of the gas in the atmosphere is borne in mind.

And then it goes on to explain how. For the full excerpt see
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress. ... r-the-sun/

Since this reflects layman knowledge in 1904, it would appear public understanding has regressed since then. Thanks Internet!

This is why I think that just as wannabe physicists who want to improve their basic understanding would learn more by studying basic mechanics and electrodynamics instead of partaking in ill-informed speculations about warp drives and string theory, skeptics would learn more by studying and learning basic textbook science instead of focusing on the latest specious controversy on various blogs. Apologies in advance, but this is also why I'm getting increasingly abrasive wrt "skepticism". Most skeptics, including professional skeptics, seem to lack the understanding of even basic domain fundamentals or scientific principles.

As with tobacco and lung cancer, there's certainly an agenda in terms of how politicians and companies use or misuse the science, but the scientific conclusions are the same regardless of what possible action or inaction politicians or voters would want to take. In this case, the science says that human CO2 emissions are 95-100% responsible for most of the warming over the past 50 years. There's no playing those numbers up or down. They are what they are, because math! People are entitled to their own opinions, and it being a democracy, their own actions, but they aren't entitled to their own facts.

We, hopefully, now return to our regular program of discussing scientifically determined impacts. The good thing about sticking to impacts is that anyone who wishes to deny them can simply ignore the predictions.

Jacob, does your head hurt from all the times you forcefully bang it into a wall?

It does

Thought you guys might be interested in this link:
http://weather.climate25.com/project/thomas-friedman/

Just saw this as well, on CNN this morning:

15 facts about sea level rise that should scare the s^*# out of you

My favorite part:

All of these risks are lessened -- or eliminated -- if we stop burning fossil fuels and chopping down carbon-gulping forests. It's possible to address this crisis.

This guy and I may have different working definitions of "possible."

Jacob you should consider writing a book about climate change, aimed at an audience with a non-scientific background.

Do you see any evidence that long term investment decisions are been influenced at this stage ? Perhaps by institutions like charitable trusts which have been around for centuries, and plan to be around for centuries more ?

GandK wrote:This guy and I may have different working definitions of "possible."

It's alright, it's not happening anyway...

@GandK - One important thing to note is that just like temperature doesn't increase equally all over (e.g. a the expected business as usual 8F global increase would be an almost 20F increase over the continental US) sea level doesn't increase by the same level everywhere. For example, the sea level at the eastern coast of the Atlantic coast is expected to rise more because the Gulf Stream/Atlantic Conveyer is slowing down.

Apparently, the scientific position is to stick to what's scientifically possible and not make statements about the political/human side where it seems unpossible. Similar to how the world's obesity crisis or alternative the world's hunger crisis is possible to solve within 12 months ... but in all practicality, unpossible because of the human factor.

See, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/0 ... te-denial/

@chenda http://www.amazon.com/The-Cartoon-Intro ... 1610914384 ... this is a good layman introduction.

On the investment decision side (aside for trusts, funds, etc. giving in to popular pressure to divest their fossil fuel holdings) the most important economic development is that insurance companies are taking climate change seriously because they will be in the position of having to pay or refusing to pay for the upcoming damage.

Local politicians, as they will also be responsible for paying, are also taking it more seriously than national politicians. Thus while there may not be a state plan, there's sometimes/often a local plan (google your city).

The best example is perhaps the split between South-Florida and North-Florida (state capital here) where the South-East is directly impacted already (ground-zero) whereas in the north, climate change are words "that shall not be spoken aloud".

Consequentially, there has been talks/demands that S-FL secede from FL and the state be split into two.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/51st- ... on-7548539

One could see how regular scenes like this might make people a bit annoyed
https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+b ... 56&bih=546
Note that is mostly seawater coming up from the ground and sewers... not undrained rainwater.

@chenda
Concerning your question about long term investment decisions being influenced by climate change. Wall Street is starting to pay attention and are starting to include climate change in some of their models:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/06/cl ... mentation/
http://www.mercer.com/services/investme ... -2015.html

My father was not allowed to buy flood insurance for the house I grew up in because it was within a 100 year flood line. I wonder how long it will be before the insurance companies stop allowing people to buy insurance on homes located close or on the coast?

@jacob @chad thanks, interesting links

@Molly
The insurance companies will slowly increase rates.
http://hamptonroads.com/2013/06/getting ... ing-pricey
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 18/?no-ist

Then slowly begin to completely say no to the more exposed areas. There are already older houses built too close to the shore the companies won't insure.

Insurance companies are also suing local governments for not making updates to some systems. In the articles case its the sewer system (geysers of backed up sewage in homes).
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html

Also read somewhere that FEMA money will no longer cover state catastrophes if the state doesn't have a plan because it denies the problem. It's a way to pressure the states via federal law.