[Heineken]

Nothing will be bigger than this. Nothing. With the possibility of nuclear war. It's going to be the shape of the century.

No wonder there are so many who can't allow themselves to believe it. (Similar phenomenon to PO.)

[ritter]

Well, if the IEA is saying it, the ship has sailed. I'm surprised their handlers allowed the admission.

[clif]

Three Degrees?????

According to Mark Lynas, in the book Six Degrees,

Three degree raise in temps will result in a return to temps last seen three million years ago during the Pliocene Era.

The end of the Amazon as a rain forest, which would then result in a Savannah type grassland ecological environment instead.

The ENSO phase in the Pacific could become the permanent stage of climate there, which means droughts in Indonesia, Australia, and floods in Peru's Atacama Desert. A failure of the Indian subcontinent Monsoon season, would undercut the agriculture there, and of course the rain and mudslides California suffers during El Nino would also become more permanent.

and of course he says this;

According to the newly updated model, a three-degree rise in global temperatures-something that would happen as early as 2050-effectively reverses the carbon cycle. Instead of absorbing CO2, vegetation and soils start releasing it in massive quantities, as soil bacteria work faster to break down organic matter in the hotter environment, and plant growth goes in reverse. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million(ppm) by 2100, giving a further 1.5^C boost to global warming.

"Six Degrees"; page 139

The planet 4.5 degrees warmer, Lyans writes last time the earth was 4 degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole.

ibid; page 192

This means at least a 20 meter rise in sea levels, and of course Cyd's worst case scenario, the massive methane release both on shore and off shore Siberia. What global temperature that would result in, and the further feedbacks that could come from it is anybody's guess.

So Breitbart is celebrating a situation that very could result in run away warming????????????

Interesting.

[dohboi]

This follows the general trajectory of scientific discussion on the issue. Two years ago an MIT study concluded that 3 degrees C was already in the pipeline. Last fall the Royal Society, the oldest scientific body in the world, devoted an issue of their publication to the possibility of a 4 degree C rise.

So now we have a prediction of six degrees from a very staid, conservative group.

Keep in mind that all projections (that I have heard of) leave out some 'slow feedbacks' such as seabed methane. So even this is likely to be on the low end.

Keep in mind, also, that:

1) Global heating (I think we can call it that at this point) is not going to magically stop at the end of the century--it is going to go much higher

2) By the time we reach 7 C vast swaths of the most populated places on the planet, such as much of the east coast of the US and China, become uninhabitable because the combination of heat and humidity becomes more than the human body can cope with--people cook in their own skins.

[ritter]

This all gets me very depressed at times. Oh what a mess we've made of our children's world. Interesting times, my ass. I'm ready for some boredom.

[PrestonSturges]

Breitbart was doing the usual weekly victory dance claiming AGW is discredited, and as always, the deniers cite a paper that says the opposite.

The paper said that they believed that warming would be limited to 2-5 degrees C, but this assumes a strictly linear relationship between temperature and CO2 with no positive feedback mechanisms. And even this optimistic analysis still says that warming will do catastrophic environmental and economic damage. So the study said, in effect, "Well, maybe not extinction, if we're lucky."

Here's the Breitbart endzone dance
http://biggovernment.com/publius/2011/1 ... an-feared/

Here's the PeakOil article
http://peakoil.com/enviroment/study-fun ... an-feared/

And this USAToday summary was much better than I expected
http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... -limits-/1

[AgentR11]

Really, yall shouldn't expect any other reaction. They've won the political and power debate, but the ones with brains and education inside those organizations know the difference between the coolaid for the masses and reality well enough. So, they have to keep the FUD flowing, for as long as the rabble will more or less buy it.

Maybe we just come to accept that all that research and work into sustaining life in space will be used in a very mundane way, right down here on earth. We become fully dependent upon technology and electricity for our lives. We are Borg.. You will be assimilated.. Resistance is futile. Tally ho?

[Heineken]

If the increase---conservative, mind you---is achieved linearly from here, that means we'll be up 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit in just 44 years---already massively world-changing. And the next few decades will take us there, with all sorts of nasty bumps along the way (we've already felt some). What gets me is that just a few years ago, all of this seemed pretty abstract. Yes, the climate was going to change, but it was all safely down the line. A century or more away. Now it's imminent. Almost immediate.

And despite all the talk and green commotion, what's been happening to the greenhouse gas levels? Rising merrily away.

[PrestonSturges]

When are we projected to double CO2 concentrations? We're up about 40% already. I'm skeptical that we'll actually be able to scrape up enough hydrocarbons for a 100% increase.

[Whitefang]

With the ice already in steep decline, methane venting, ocean life dying.............this process is not going to take a hundred years from now. 10 degrees celcius in a decade seems more appropiate as a guess for the global heating spike.
That would mean fast collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, an armada of ice floating in the North Atlantic.....Heinrich event cooling things down at first, maybe we'll get summer snowblizards in Europe. Incredible amounts of rain for sure.
This is indeed bound to pick up speed and give rise to exponential growth in temperature.

We'd better prepare to bug out as soon as people realize there is not going to be enough food for all of us humans and that it is going to get worse every week from now. No worries about the powers that be, they will die the same death as we.
Terrible and yet.............

[AgentR11]

When are we projected to double CO2 concentrations? We're up about 40% already. I'm skeptical that we'll actually be able to scrape up enough hydrocarbons for a 100% increase.

Couple of the presenters of these agw talks have charts showing oil, ng, coal, tar sands. As juicy and delicious as light sweet crude is, its just a thin film compared to how much dirty coal, tar sands goop, and ng remain.

Scary thing is that we're (humans) building infrastructure that indicates we have the intention of burning every last ounce of coal. That's way past doubling CO2 concentrations..

[Loki]

We will burn it all as quickly as we can, coal, the tar sands, NG, shale, everything.

The only thing that will stop us will be slamming face first into either an economic wall or an ecological wall. I'm hoping it'll be the former, but I suspect the latter is more likely.

It's occurred to me in my darker moments that maybe those of us concerned about ecological collapse should do our best to accelerate economic collapse in order to stave off the worst of the environmental disaster on our horizon. Perhaps vote Republican?

[AdTheNad]

We will burn it all as quickly as we can, coal, the tar sands, NG, shale, everything.

The only thing that will stop us will be slamming face first into either an economic wall or an ecological wall. I'm hoping it'll be the former, but I suspect the latter is more likely.

It's occurred to me in my darker moments that maybe those of us concerned about ecological collapse should do our best to accelerate economic collapse in order to stave off the worst of the environmental disaster on our horizon. Perhaps vote Republican?

That is one possibility, the other is - the sooner economic collapse happens the sooner we burn every single tree in sight, to keep heating our food and houses. That guy from war torn Bosnia said all the trees from within the city didn't last long.

Yes we had some trees in my city, parks, fruit trees, but most of the city is building and houses but belive me all trees in the city is going to be burned very fast when you dont have eletricity for cooking and heating. After that all what you have is furniture, doors, wooden floors… (and belive me that stuff is burning too fast)

Plus it seems what is happening, and may continue to happen, is more and more different areas fall into poverty, leaving plenty of capital available for the places that still have resources. That means we will keep digging and burning anything that will burn no matter how poor that town, that state, and that country over there get.

[meemoe_uk]

Another
x says y temp increase by z thread. You AGWers love them.
This pie in the sky fantasy is then taken by AGWers as hard facts.
Religious rule : The future is certain, its the past that is uncertain.
It should be the other way round.

1st, no-one knows what the temp will be by 2100. We'll have to wait for the next G-cycle to start before worthwhile predictions can be made. The temp variation over the last few centuries is about 2.5C per century, up and down.

Three degree raise in temps will result in a return to temps last seen three million years ago during the Pliocene Era.

Oh, well, thats OK then. Because we are currently at about the same temperature as 3 million years ago. Current ice-age-interglacials are about the same temp as the ice age of 3 million years ago.
You have to go back at least 13.5 million years to get to before the current ice age.

last time the earth was 4 degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole.

He's out by 2 degrees. From the polar ocean record, it took at least 6C of warming to melt all the ice. But this is saying it the wrong way round. It should be : Melting the ice resulted in a 6C warming.

Oh, and all of the fossil and sediment record shows the world was a very nice place to live when it was 6C warmer. Much less desert. Much more forest and grasslands.

2) By the time we reach 7 C vast swaths of the most populated places on the planet, such as much of the east coast of the US and China, become uninhabitable because the combination of heat and humidity becomes more than the human body can cope with--people cook in their own skins.

The highest energy input regions on the planet are the equatorial rain forests. They are good places to sustain life. Humans managed to live there for millions of years. They are kept relatively cool by water vapour, which is very abundant. The planets air-con is in full swing there. The US and China are both along way from the equator.
Jungle. Most energy intense place on the planet. Life grows by itself without anyone helping it.


Population density map of the world.

Plenty of people living closer to the equator than US or chinese.
Plenty of space to move to if your land is encroached by desert. ( overall less desert when global temperature increases )

<3 degrees rise results in >The end of the Amazon as a rain forest, which would then result in a Savannah type grassland ecological environment instead.

Where's the evidence for that? _IF_ the global temp rises by 3C, jungle will naturally stay cool with water vapour, so how do you _know_ otherwise? There's no evidence to support your assertion.

[PrestonSturges]

Well when you go back far enough, the continents were in different places, so weather and ocean patterns were very very different.

Yes life can stand a lot more heat. Part of that was seasonal migrations. And in more recent history, we have seen countless cities abandoned for various regions. We'd come through all sorts of problems with enough land to migrate and unlimited supplies of fuel.

Any kind of large scale disruption in an increasingly crowded and energy starved world would create mass migrations of people with little ability to survive. Life would go on, but there would be a substantial die-off.

[Heineken]

Oh, and all of the fossil and sediment record shows the world was a very nice place to live when it was 6C warmer. Much less desert. Much more forest and grasslands.

When it was 6oC warmer there were no people. No human impacts. The world was pristine. Maybe it was nicer for reptiles and bugs, but how about for our complex civilization?

It won't be a nice place for crops, especially the grains on which our civilization is utterly dependent. They don't photosynthesize well at higher temperatures and will die. Maybe we can shift some of that agriculture farther north, but it will almost certainly be a case of too little too late.

Billions will starve.

Similarly, forests have ALREADY been deteriorating as temperatures have risen. Bugs, plant diseases, pressure from violent storms and fires.

When temperate forests disappear suddenly the soils degrade rapidly. They won't be replaced by lush jungles. More likely by thin grasses and sagebrush.

Doesn't bode well.

I find the argument that basically says, Well, we can't predict the future, so therefore we shouldn't worry about global warming, to be rather specious.

[dohboi]

Not only are we headed to global temperatures not seen in millions of years, we are headed there very quickly.

And rate of change is everything.

If someone gently brings a cannon ball toward you, it is very easy to "adapt" by moving aside.

If someone sets of a cannon right at your head, point blank, adaptation is not an option.

The only difference is rate of change.

We are in the second scenario.

Few complex life forms will survive the blow.

[kiwichick]

will the arctic methane release be factored into the next IPCC report?

[Pretorian]

No worries, kiddos. Gaia will bounce back eventually. 10, 15 million years from now it will be just like it was, may be even better, and more importantly, human-free. Death is the destination of every life form, so, there is no point in fussing really. Shame we have to check out so early , perhaps, if we could last half or even a third of what a normal species live, like another million years or so, we could have reached the stars or even learn not to soil our own home. I doubt about the latter though.

[dohboi]

Pret, no one can predict the future perfectly.

We were already well into a mass extinction event before the effects of GW really got going. So now with GW we are in something like a double extinction event. Does that double the recovery time? Does it increase it by an order of magnitude or more? If the latter--hundreds of millions of years rather than tens--we are then pushing up against the time that the sun will be to big and bright for the planet to support life, so recovery would not be possible. And of course any number of other terrestrial or non- events could set back the recovery in the intervening period.

Life on the planet may recover as you predict, but there is just no way to know that for certain.