back to article Warming: 6°C unlikely, 2°C nearly certain

Under “business as usual” global warming will almost certainly exceed 2°C by 2100, but the high-end extreme range of warming of 6°C is unlikely to occur. That “good news, bad news” scenario comes from work conducted by Dr Roger Bodman from Victoria University, with Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University …

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                          1. NomNomNom

                            Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                            We are not still coming out of an ice age. That's just an old climate denier canard to handwave away the late 20th century warming. Warming they didn't expect in the first place and now have to frantically find an excuse for because they don't want to accept man's role.

                            There's no reason to expect the world to continue warming over the 21st century apart from human emissions. In fact some of the more deniery skeptics are even predicting cooling over the 21st century! That option doesn't even appear on the IPCC forecasts.

                            1. Anonymous Coward
                              Anonymous Coward

                              Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                              @Nom:

                              "We are not still coming out of an ice age. That's just an old climate denier canard to handwave away the late 20th century warming. Warming they didn't expect in the first place and now have to frantically find an excuse for because they don't want to accept man's role."

                              Odd. The initial problems with the MMCC theory is splitting the natural warming which is the part of the cycle we are currently up to. That was towards the start of the climate debate. I also dont see anyone going frantic apart from the headless chickens trying to stop the sky from falling.

                              "There's no reason to expect the world to continue warming over the 21st century apart from human emissions"

                              The first problem to this statement is the lack of proof of how our emissions are affecting things. The next step would be proving the Co2 emissions effect (to prove your belief in co2 theory). But 63% of the predictive uncertainty is the lack of understanding of our emissions. Which means when the models fall over it is usually due to a lack of knowledge of emissions. Boom.

                              "That option doesn't even appear on the IPCC forecasts."

                              I dont know if the world will be warming or cooling, there are a lot of variables and as acknowledged by this paper we dont understand them. However I have zero faith in the IPCC forecasts, reports or actions. Even if they cleaned up their act and moved to a more scientific and fact based reporting I feel they have demonstrated severe bias and I couldnt trust them. Wasnt there an article on the reg a while ago about a couple of countries ignoring the IPCC because they are unreliable and make baseless claims?

                              1. NomNomNom

                                Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                                "The first problem to this statement is the lack of proof of how our emissions are affecting things. "

                                Wrong. You just deny it. Just as creationists deny evolution. You throw out "there is a lack of proof" just as the creationists do.

                                1. Anonymous Coward
                                  Anonymous Coward

                                  Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                                  @Nom:

                                  "Wrong. You just deny it. Just as creationists deny evolution. You throw out "there is a lack of proof" just as the creationists do."

                                  At no point do I deny evolution. There is actual proof. You claim I throw out the lack of proof, yet it is stated in this article that 63% of the predictive uncertainty in the climate models is-

                                  "climate sensitivity, the future behaviour of the carbon cycle, and the cooling effect of aerosols."

                                  followed by:

                                  "the remaining 37 percent driven by combinations of sources."

                                  Sounds like you are the creationist arguing against the facts

                        1. haloburn
                          FAIL

                          Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                          @nomnomnom and you would now have us take the opinion that Dr James Hansen has nothing to do with the IPCC. You sir need to take a long lie to a dark room.

                          1. NomNomNom

                            Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                            Hansen does have nothing to do with the IPCC. You need to snap out of your denial. The IPCC forecasts have always shown far less than 6C warming by 2100. So when you claimed that "they" had been "in no uncertain terms" predicting 6C by 2100 you were WRONG.

              1. strum

                [Citation needed]

                "We were told in no uncertain terms that the forecasts were for at least 6 degrees of warming due to man made CO2 emission"

                Let's see a peer-reviewed paper that said this. ISTM that denialists make this claim too often, and get away with it too often.

                1. haloburn

                  Re: [Citation needed]

                  I did several posts back, keep up.

            1. Tom 13

              Re: Jetstream has sweet

              While I concur all the "scientists" claiming AGW is settled, the Jetstream is actually pretty much the key to all the Bad Things (TM pending) the warmists claim will happen. Shift it so it doesn't hit the UK and your weather changes radically (colder as I recall). Shift it in the US and the weather changes radically (hotter colder depending which way it moves).

              The problem is, no matter how much they try to deny it, they don't have a long enough observational baseline to determine what is normal. And that's assuming you have actual usable definitions for the terms you are measuring as well as the instrumentation to measure all of it.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Can I have my money back now please?

            Pretty sure it used to be the Gulf stream that was shifting south which would lead to the polar ice caps settling around Leicester and the entire of England becoming home to polar bears. Now it's the Jet stream too?

            That global warming, always making things horribler. Why is it that a warmer, wetter climate can't be good for any parts of the planet?

      1. Paul Hampson 1

        Re: Can I have my money back now please?

        Where I the article does it say this? The article makes no reference to humans and indeed any cause of warming, only the problems in forecasting.

        I think you may me reading your own personal opinion into the piece.

        1. NomNomNom

          Re: Can I have my money back now please?

          The article doesn't need to make reference to it. The warming forecast is due to human emissions.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Can I have my money back now please?

            "The article doesn't need to make reference to it. The warming forecast is due to human emissions."

            So you have written so it shall be. We worship you oh deity. Please dont smite us with your copious gasses.

            Back in the real world...

            1. NomNomNom

              Re: Can I have my money back now please?

              There seems to be some confusion.

              If you DONT accept this study which says humans will very likely cause about 2C warming by 2100, then you have no reason to think anything has changed.

              You can't say "Can I have my money back now please?" as if this new information is game changing if you don't actually accept what the study says!

              Of course climate skeptics do want to have their cake and eat it too!

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                @NomNomNom:

                "You can't say "Can I have my money back now please?" as if this new information is game changing if you don't actually accept what the study says!

                Of course climate skeptics do want to have their cake and eat it too!"

                You seem not to be paying attention. Skeptics have always been asking for their money back. I want my money back. Why should I buy your crud cake and be forced to eat it?

                This information only demonstrates the unity and knowledge of the climate scientists. Pretty much bugger all. So yeah give us our money back and pay for your own toys

                1. NomNomNom

                  Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                  "You seem not to be paying attention. Skeptics have always been asking for their money back."

                  The study provides both a lower and upper limit for the range of warming. Skeptics are pointing at the study and demanding everyone take the upper limit seriously, but when faced with the lower limit they themselves throw the study under the bus, because they still want to toy with the idea that man isn't causing warming. well if they are right and we shouldn't take the lower limit seriously, why should we take the upper limit seriously?

                  If the study is wrong and "we know nothing" to paraphrase, does that mean 6C is back on the cards?

                  1. Anonymous Coward
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: Can I have my money back now please?

                    @NomNomNom:

                    "Skeptics are pointing at the study and demanding everyone take the upper limit seriously, but when faced with the lower limit they themselves throw the study under the bus"

                    You really dont pay attention do you. Skeptics demand proof. Your proof is nothing to something unknown might happen. Believers demand money, skeptics demand proof. We mock your studies which claim something will happen... but only if the figures are fluffed. Otherwise your predictions say nothing will happen up to absolute doom. Otherwise known as nothing is known.

                    "If the study is wrong and "we know nothing" to paraphrase, does that mean 6C is back on the cards?"

                    Yes, just as absolutely nothing is also on the cards. It leaves the situation back to the range of completely useless.

                    "because they still want to toy with the idea that man isn't causing warming"

                    How many witches have you burned? Failure to do so is just toying with the idea of letting children be gobbled up.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Can I have my money back now please?

        "Looks like it was settled to me."

        If you only look to the left you will never see the right. Considering the comments on here that line really does make me laugh.

        "Humans, not nature, are driving global temperature changes. They are not saying 2C by 2100 because of the Sun. They are saying humans. It's nice to see climate skeptics finally accepting this."

        Who is saying humans? You do. The IPCC does. In fact everyone in the religion does. But step outside your religion and look to the world and you see it is not settled. Some of us are still waiting for proof that it isnt the natural trend.

        1. NomNomNom

          Re: Can I have my money back now please?

          "Who is saying humans?"

          Anyone who is accepting the study behind this article is, ie the people claiming "can I have my money back now please". Because that's what the study says - that humans are causing the warming.

        2. strum

          Considering the comments on here

          Not a wise course - making decisions based on comments on The Register.

  1. Fading
    Pint

    Well then thats job jobbed then.

    Didn't we need to keep CO2 emissions down to keep the temperature increase at 2 degrees? Well then we can all go home, disband the IPCC, get our green taxes back and bask in the knowledge of a job well done.......

  2. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    OK, I'll settle for 2 deg C

    Although 6 would have been nice, given the weather outside...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And Spring in the UK...

    says 'Daft twat, its fucking freezing out there in MAY!!!!!!!' - dont give me your global warming shite - to paraphrase 'You know nothing. If you even knew you know nothing that would be something; but you dont!'

  4. despun

    Not so fast, sunshine.

    "Waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy".

    If the predictions are now in the lower range, a policy of wait and see, and adapt if and when we have to becomes much more attractive. It was only ever the catastrophic predictions that could be used for wrecking the ecomony etc.

    Looks liek a game-changer to me.

  5. doctariAFC2
    Devil

    Waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy.....

    Translation - if we wait until we know much more about all this rot, then our funding will be jeopardized and we will all lose out gubmint cheese and gubmint supported jobs, not to mention a crippling of our agenda....

    THAT is the FAIL these climate "scientists" speak of.

  6. Identity
    Boffin

    Hmmm...

    Forecasts (for want of a better word) I've heard over the last 20 years were for 4°C, square in the middle of the "controversy." At that temperature, sea level is set to rise by meters. We would reach a point where feedback will make it impossible to mitigate — we can only adapt or die.

    1. Mikel
      Facepalm

      Re: Hmmm...

      If you're in a position where sea level rise is threatening your imminent demise you should turn your back to the sea and walk forward 20 yards or so. If you can't walk then roll your wheelchair or crawl or flop or ask the person who brings you food to drag you. There. Now you should safely meet your end from some other cause when your time comes.

  7. Jorba

    But it's not certain there's even a trend

    No one seems to have taken notice of the fact that the (UK) Met office was forced recently to admit to parliament that there has been no statistically significant warming trend since 1880.

    i.e. there's no trend, there's nothing to suggest temperatures will increase. It's all random natural variability.

    1. NomNomNom

      Re: But it's not certain there's even a trend

      "No one seems to have taken notice of the fact that"

      Of course the Met Office haven't admitted anything of the kind.

      It's both ludicrous and amazing that climate deniers think they can get away with making up such ridiculous statements for propaganda purposes. I guess some people really do fall for such things?

      Other times they'll act all "reasonable" and claim they don't deny the world has warmed, they just question the cause. But as you point out here, they will happily change their tune deny any warming since 1880 if they think they can get sufficient propaganda mileage out of that.

  8. aidanstevens
    Stop

    Positive feedbacks

    It's all well and good looking at the carbon cycle, but unless you look at the positive feedbacks caused by 2 degrees of warming (which will almost certainly push us towards 6 degrees in short order) then this study can't be taken seriously.

  9. sisk

    Tell you what....

    I've got a solution to the question. To get the answer I will need a Deloreon. Failing that I think I might be able to muddle my way through with a 1950s era police box that's bigger on the inside.

  10. Mikel
    Meh

    They have discovered the oceans are thermal sinks now. Nice.

    The figures they have for ocean heating though, they compute to an atmospheric heating of about 90C. I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. They're counting ocean temps for carbon sinks now, but I don't believe they're correctly accounting for the thermal variation in solubility of CO2 in water. It turns out that cold water holds SCADS more CO2 in solution than warm water does. In fact, that sort of explains the "atmospheric CO2 as a lagging indicator of warming" as the warmer water gives up its dissolved CO2 to the air. That water is as cool as it is because 15,000 years ago when it had been cold as a Republican's heart all over the planet for 140,000 years the oceans had become cool enough to absorb far more CO2. It takes a long time for that much water to heat up after the Earth's orbit comes to a warmer clime for the brief interglacials like the one we're in now. As the cold deep water surfaces and warms in warmer sun after up to 1600 years it's going to give up some of the CO2 it captured long ago. It takes many cycles to give up it all because most of the water isn't in a conveyor and the CO2 blanket keeps the air and sea warmer even as the orbital cycle has moved to a cooler zone.

    They're including solar cycles too now, and orbital variations. That's nice because the Sun's periodic variability and the Earth's varying orbit are "settled science" in hard sciences. The Earth has moved out of our "sweet spot" where men can live in current numbers but it will take a while before our CO2 blanket is depleted. Wait until they hear about geothermal energy. They're going to have to "adjust" again.

    Seriously, it's nice they're starting to refine the models to include some basic primitives that should have always been in there. Another hundred years and they might be able to be able to make a nice reliable prediction. By then it ought to start getting cold again and the fall into the ice is rather steep. Frankly climatologists need to get some instruction from thermal physicists on the quality of data from a thermocouple and the meaningfulness of averaging data in excess of the instrument's ability because they have their statistical analysis all wrong. The mean of many points of ignorance is not "data". At the level of their reportage the data is random. They rely too much on statistical analysis.

    What is amazing to me how despite decades of "settled science" we keep getting these huge admissions that "we didn't include or correctly calibrate this overwhelming factor that hoses up our predictions" about every three months. If you add up all of these corrections for the last few years they make more than 100% of the result. Yet the science is "settled". The toe of that hockey stick was a ski jump to some astronomical projections and now it turns out it was an anomaly if it was even more than an observational error artifact, or data manipulation. Nobody screaming "settled science" now wants to talk about the thermal cataclysm that didn't happen back when that was "settled science".

    Still folk feel free to write fear-mongering articles like Phil Plait's recent The Arctic Ice "Death Spiral" that dramatize the issue with phrases like "ice-free Arctic by 2040" without mentioning they mean "at the height of summer, for 15 minutes". "Death Spiral?" Really? And without mentioning that Antarctic ice is increasing so the net ice balance is the same - so no global net energy transfer whatsoever. Really, I expect more science and less art from Phil. Maybe he should stick with astronomy. He's good at that, and shouldn't turn his fame into a bully pulpit about stuff he doesn't understand.

    Frankly, +2C isn't quite enough for me. I would like +6, or even +8. Thankfully after we run out of oil and gas we have Methane Clathrates to keep us warm and turn the wheels of industry. Evolution has found a way to prevent oil, coal and gas, but methane clathrates can be farmed. We might yet keep the planet warm enough to sustain our culture through the next cold period. That should get us to 40 billion humans, self-sustaining interstellar colonies, fusion energy and the like. If we don't kill each other first.

    1. NomNomNom

      Re: They have discovered the oceans are thermal sinks now. Nice.

      "And without mentioning that Antarctic ice is increasing so the net ice balance is the same - so no global net energy transfer whatsoever. "

      You are wrong, the decline in the Arctic is much greater than the increase in the Antarctic. Plus the Arctic decline is in summer when solar insolation is greatest while the increase in the Antarctic is during the winter.

      "Frankly, +2C isn't quite enough for me. I would like +6, or even +8."

      Then you are a reckless dick.

      1. Fading
        Pint

        Re: They have discovered the oceans are thermal sinks now. Nice.

        Erm Noms - when it's summer in the Arctic it's winter in the Antarctic. PS you might went to tone back the Arctic ice loss panic, the hysteria might come back to haunt you (we only have 30 years of satellite data not even one full cycle) . Also given as an ice free artic allows the ocean to cool quicker it might be self limiting.

        1. NomNomNom

          Re: They have discovered the oceans are thermal sinks now. Nice.

          "when it's summer in the Arctic it's winter in the Antarctic"

          There's less sunlight during winter. Therefore changes during summer make more of a difference. It's the arctic loss in summer that has the most effect on energy balance. The antarctic change in winter has relatively little impact.

          And in any case the arctic as a region is impacted by the decline in sea ice. What happens in the Antarctic can't "undo" what is actually happening in the Arctic.

          "you might went to tone back the Arctic ice loss panic, the hysteria might come back to haunt you"

          The Arctic is losing ice at a rapid rate and heading towards a summer free of ice. It's you who needs to tone down the denial of that fact.

          "Also given as an ice free artic allows the ocean to cool quicker it might be self limiting."

          An ice free arctic absorbs more sunlight. In an ice free arctic all that sunlight can go into heating water, rather than being used on melting ice. There are a lot of feedbacks with regard to sea ice and temperature but the evidence is strongly that positive feedbacks dominate. That's the only way to explain why the arctic in the distant past got so hot and was ice free all year round. It's clearly not self-limiting.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Gasses are just gasses.

    What matters is how much water vapour there is and how much sunlight is reaching the ground. As a star gets older, it gets bigger and hotter. There is nothing we can do about that. When we burn hydrocarbons for fuel, we add tons of water vapor to the atmosphere. The tonnage of water vapour from burning hydrocarbons is far greater than the tonnage of carbon dioxide. Water vapour, just in case you are still among the mislead, is a far better "greehhouse gas" than carbon dioxide. Also, all that waste heat must go somewhere and there is nothing that we can do about that. Even if we converted to all nuclear power today, we would still be confronted with the problem of waste heat. More importantly, when we build roads, buildings and parking lots, we change the albedo of Earth and it soaks up much more sunlight than it ever did before. You don't really hear anyone arguing for fewer and poorer roads, now do you? There are costs involved with improving things and guess what? We in the west will have fewer people to pick up that tab. Our populations, and those of Russia and Japan or in decline. So is the population of Brazil. It has started to decline as well.

    So, ignoring the problem might well be the best solution. The climate will stabalize because we are about to consume far less in the way of resources and that includes energy.

  12. Colin 4
    Facepalm

    @If you want a stable climate

    Man has been wiped out regularly ? Wow, nice job re-evolving us to the same species every 150000 years, evolution !

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