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Is 'Prescription for Disaster' Our 'Most Optimistic' Climate Future?
New data indicates warming of 2C now planet's "most optimistic" scenario
New climate information from French scientists indicate that global warming of 2 C is the "most optimistic" scenario. Yet this is the amount of warming James Hansen has referred to as a "prescription for disaster."
Agence France-Presse reports on the new climate scenarios:
French scientists unveiling new estimates for global warming said on Thursday the 2 C (3.6 F) goal enshrined by the United Nations was "the most optimistic" scenario left for greenhouse-gas emissions.
The estimates, compiled by five scientific institutes, will be handed to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for consideration in its next big overview on global warming and its impacts. [...]
The French team said that by 2100, warming over pre-industrial times would range from two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5.0 C (9.0 F).
The most pessimistic scenarios foresee warming of 3.5-5.0 C (6.3-9.0 F), the scientists said in a press release.
Achieving 2C, "the most optimistic scenario," is possible but "only by applying climate policies to reduce greenhouse gases," they said.
The climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 had agreed to a limit of 2 C in global warming, a deal many saw as a failure to stop runaway global warming. John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said at the time:
"The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. [...] It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen."
James Hansen: "Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient. It would be a prescription for disaster."
In December of 2011, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen stated at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union:
"The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient," Hansen said. "It would be a prescription for disaster."
"We don’t have a substantial cushion between today's climate and dangerous warming," Hansen said. "Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying feedbacks in response to moderate additional global warming."
"Humans have overwhelmed the natural, slow changes that occur on geologic timescales," Hansen said.
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260 Comments so far
Show AllSo it goes.
As I get older--mighty older than most--the climate change phenomenon has come to seem quite . . . natural. No more anger for me. I'm completely detached from it all. I now find it interesting instead of appalling.
Well, yeah. What did you expect?
We humans were "designed" by evolution to reproduce, take over resources, and never mind what happens beyond the immediate survival of our offspring.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is a sign of our evolutionary success.
And like any critter on the planet, we, too, are subject to laws of diminishing returns, bloom and die-off.
I recommend that we embrace the consequences of our success. Otherwise, we might go insane before we go instinct. And who wants to miss that show?
MBendzela
With friends like you, who needs enemies?
You claim age and wisdom, but are in possession of only one.
=========="By 2100,,, by the end of the century,,, by 2120",,, and their dumb beat goes on . And it is total optomistic bullshit.
We will see runaway and (*irreversible*) global warming by (*2020*) or perhaps sooner, not 2040, 2080 or by 2100, if we do not have a world wide massive effort to stop burning coal, plant billions of trees and replace the fossil fuel power plants with clean energy sources, which are readily available and clean does not include nuclear power.
"Irreversible" means exactly that, it (cannot) be reversed and the catastrophic disaster Dr. James Hansen warns us of WILL occur far sooner than almost all of the scientists have predicted and quite obviously still are predicting.
I will gladly argue or debate my comments with any who may disagree at the end of the comments.
I wrote, ("if we do not have a world wide massive effort to stop burning coal, plant billions of trees and replace the fossil fuel power plants with clean energy sources, which are readily available and clean does not include nuclear power.").
I have written more about it further down the line of comments.
That of course is very narrow minded, very selfish and an incredible ignorant bunch of blathering crap, by a man who later says he is a gay with no children, so he doesn't care about the innocent world's children... How happy or content can gay be?
And AGW climate change is success???__ No! It is a disasterous catastrophic failure.
Humans could indeed have taken over the (natural) resources of the planet, the universe, of the provided wind, tides, sunbeams and geothermal and have our desired power and a clean planet at the same time and leave the innocent children of the world a safe, clean environment and planet and have a fair chance of a happy and or gay life if they wish.
So thanks to MB, a good deal of the first comments posted were just arguing and back stabbing, sensless crap.
There are many excellent comments of educational value however and perhaps some good will come from the thread... There are the Siouxroses, the Aleph Nulls, Alycons, PaulKs and so many other decent, honest and thoughtful people here to learn from.
BTW: I'm averse to particular predictions, so I'd take back my last line, "Otherwise, we might go insane before we go instinct. And who wants to miss that show?"
I'd amend it to read: "Otherwise, we might go insane before we enter the era of Consequences. And who wants to miss that show?"
The idea of a population of 7 billion going extinct any time soon is a bit of overestimation.How many is "enough" for such change, and how many in opposition would be enough to stop them? This is unanswerable.
In any case, it would be the same old thing, "us" against "them," with the requisite demonization and bloodshed.
Siouxrose, you can satisfy your curiosity about who I am by Googling "Mike Bendzela."
I'm a 52-year-old gay atheist farmer, writing instructor, and old time musician in Maine.
If you don't like what I say, just ignore me. I am small potatoes.
What ~Siouxrose~ stated about you is very apptropriate.. And you now say that you are the ripe old age of 52,, Wow. how about that, so "impressive", as you attempt to maintain in your first posted comments.
I'm 78 and still learning and I learn a hell of a lot more from the SueRoses than I do from the sorry likes of you... You are pitiful... Your first posted comment is detracting corporate garbage and any who may support you here are just a pitiful as you are.
I sometimes think some people believe that a vast emission of self-righteous anger will compensate for greenhouse gases.
I suspect it will not work.
LJG100, Sadly, all the compassion in the world is not going to deflect anthropogenic climate change one iota. You call it "resignation." I call it "acceptance." Once you start viewing things the way they are, it is simply too interesting for words.
We are living in the most extraordinary of times. Getting angry, or self-righteous, or insulting (as many other commenters here do, not you in particular) will not check human population growth or our consumptive habits.
We now have the highest quality of information ever at our disposal, and also the highest quantity, AND it is freely accessible as never before. And yet we have presidential candidates who are convinced that a Jew 2,000 years ago rose from the dead, walked through a wall, and ate a fish. Simultaneously, they believe that CO2 "is not a pollutant" because "it's good for plants."
Even Sophocles couldn't dream up a better disaster plot.
On the other hand, MBendzela, a quick search of the site shows that you are most definitely pro-GMO crops, sympathetic to Monsanto, somewhat contemptuous of proponents of organic farming, and argued that Vandana Shiva was wrong (Your words: "Anyone who says something so false, so bigoted doesn't deserve the time of day") for making the statement,
“Reductionist science is a source of violence against nature and women because it subjugates and dispossesses them of their full productivity, power, and potential.”
And you tried to discredit Greenpeace by citing some site run by the "Chlorine Chemistry Division of the American Chemistry Council".
Considering that you have made 16 posts so far, and about 12 more posts refer back to you on this thread, and seeing the thrust of your arguments, I am surprised that people did not see a certain pattern here. Maybe you believe in what you say, but how is it helping anyone? I think that's a fair question because YOU keep asking how any of the discussion here has lowered the temperature or GHG emissions.
Welcome!
How was Hell?;)
What instruments do you play?
(Though it's a bit optimistic to call cooperation a "feminine trait". Males usually cooperate well, too. While women often backbite and bitch more than cooperate, and generally fall into groupthink easier than men. Overall women are physically weaker than men, so their fighting tends more to the mental-emotional than physical - as does their forms of cooperation. With the addendum that this male/female-split thinking itself is dubious - perhaps it's a product of female thinking... (the poster said in a starkly paradoxical twist of self-contradiction ;-).)
But 'Mbenzela's points are valid, too - only maybe missing that the increasing and future cooperation between humans hasn't happened yet, but looks in many ways promising although also in many ways dismal, as we're in a stage and state of polarization; i.e. "things" getting both better and worse at the same time, due to an increase in humans on this planet at ca. 10,000 per hour (!).
Only time will tell. As it is, the future is getting more and more complex to predict, with steadily more humans making all our premises more volatile than previously. This also means that if suddenly all human were to agree more - which the increased volatility opens for - then enormous changes in our attitudes and conduct could happen in a relative blink of an eye. - Maybe that's what "2012" is all about, and that notion might even be self-reinforcing and self-confirming.
Still, on the topic of climate extreming, so many development-trends and activities of us humans are locked-in to dominant technologies with destructive consequenses, that it's getting harder and harder to change our directions: "turn the wheel before the brick wall", so to speak. - Like a driver who won't turn the wheel hard because the movement will crease his nice shirt, and can't slow down because of all the other cars at same speed in the other lanes.
;-)
Although as it turns out, I've eagerly read some of the proponents of "General Semantics" (which is NOT "Generalized semantics") like Neil Postman and George Lakoff - as well as sci-fi writers A.E. van Vogt and Robert Heinlein, I wasn't aware of the field as such, "a program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain [...] both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity." (from the good Wikipedia-article on it).
Thanks much for the tip. Very interesting. - Will look further into the subject. :-)