Popular Science: no comments, please! & Global warming updates
If you were born after April 1985, you’ve never experienced a month with
a global average temperature that was below the historic mean.
[Global warming and Comment Sections closed]
Popular Science recently decided to remove comment sections on its website, for reasons that are crystal clear its statement on the website:
Comments sections can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off...we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
I think this is great. There has been some indications conservative think tanks and lobbying firms have used professional "trolls" with the express aim of bogging down hard science stories, for reasons outlined in the research cited at the link; this same technique of creating doubt was used by the tobacco lobby in the 1990s, regarding independent research showing an undeniable link between tobacco and lung cancer.
New IPCC report issued.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has started releasing a new series of reports on global warming, and the results aren't surprising:
It is now considered even more certain (> 95%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. Natural internal variability and natural external forcings (eg the sun) have contributed virtually nothing to the warming since 1950 - the share of these factors was narrowed down by IPCC to ±0.1 degrees. The future warming by 2100 - with comparable emission scenarios - is about the same as in the previous report. For the highest scenario, the best-estimate warming by 2100 is still 4°C [measured from an already warmer 1980-1999, not 1800] …
That four degree centigrade increase predicted should be alarming for a lot of reasons: mass extinction events have typically occurred with a temperature increase of five degrees or more. The other concern, is that by the very nature of the process, the IPCC's predictions tend to play things pretty safe, and are turning out to be on the conservative side. One example: case in point is the melting of the Arctic ice cap, it's melting at a much faster rate than was predicted.
Sea ice melting predictions and observed trends
But some scientists think the IPCC reports are pulling-their-punches: Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown. by George Monbiot noted:
Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative. Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch. In other words, it’s perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history. [emphasis added ].
The New York Times looked at this issue of the risks of being too conservative in the predictions (A Climate Alarm, Too Muted for Some)
Climate change skeptics often disparage these periodic reports from the United Nations, claiming that the panel writing them routinely stretches the boundaries of scientific evidence to make the problem look as dire as possible. So it is interesting to see that in these two important cases, the panel seems to be bending over backward to be scientifically conservative....
Who could blame the panel if it wound up erring on the side of scientific conservatism? Yet most citizens surely want something else from the group: an unvarnished analysis of the risks they face. To be clear, even if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ends up sticking with the lowball numbers in these two instances, they are worrisome enough. As best scientists can tell, the question with sea level is not whether it is going to get to three feet and then five feet of increase, but merely whether it will happen in this century or the next.
Likewise, with temperature, the panel is saying only that the lowball numbers are possible, not that they are likely. In fact, the metric used in the scientific literature, the temperature effect of doubled carbon dioxide, is merely a convenient way of comparing studies. Many people make the mistake of thinking that is how much of a global temperature increase will actually occur. At the pace we are going, there is no reason to think that we will stop burning fossil fuels when carbon dioxide doubles. We could be on our way to tripling or quadrupling the amount of that heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. In that case, experts believe, even an earth that turns out to be somewhat insensitive to carbon dioxide will undergo drastic changes. Obviously, the high estimates are even scarier. So it would be nice to hear an explanation from the drafters of this coming report as to why they made decisions that effectively play up the low-end possibilities.
There are growing concerns that governments will not be able to anything to stop the current acceleration of the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. To keep climate change to 3 degrees of warming, scientists believe we've reached about slightly more than half of our carbon "budget." Top climate scientists say in a new report that industrial carbon emissions need to be kept below a cumulative total of 1 trillion tons to avoid dangerous climate change - and they note that humanity has already used up more than half that allotment. This will require significant amounts of fossil fuels to be keep underground and undeveloped. That seems so unlikely given the political climate in Washington, D.C. It's fascinating to see conservatives who argue about the economic heritage of large government debt, and the impact it will have for their grand children, but it's extremely rare to see this talked about in terms of climate change.
Here is NBC Nightly News' Anne Thompson with her report on the IPCC latest findings. Video link in case embed doesn't work.
Here is a very cool interactive map at New Scientist, that shows the impact of climate change for where *YOU* live. Sadly, Russia and Europe and the Arctic areas are showing so far, the greatest increases. It's bad particularly for Russia, due to the melting of permafrost will cause methane to be released, which is 20 times more powerful than Co2, and would cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Top ten signs of global warming as measured by science.
Clicking on image will open a larger version in new browser window.
Real Climate (a consortium of climate scientists based out of Columbia University) has the latest summation of the new IPCC report at this link.