Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

[XemaSab]

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz215sLdjJI

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[GliderGuider]

2. Paragraphs like this are enough to give me night sweats

"There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.

And people wonder why I'm a doomer...
"It's the science, stupid!"

Of course these guys are just using trends in the data without factoring in all the inevitable policy miracles and economic second comings, so what do they know?

[phantom power]

5. yeah, but he means the happy fun science fiction with flying cars... right?

flying cars?

[GliderGuider]

7. That would be the one...

[XemaSab]

8. I should start a witch-hunt

to find and ban all the replicants in teh E/E.

[pscot]

9. They'll be the ones

who don't sweat.

[GliderGuider]

11. +1

[Nederland]

12. Still ignoring the facts?

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees."

In line with a temperature increase of six degrees--if you trust computer models that have overestimated temperature rises while underestimating CO2 increases.

[NickB79]

14. So let's say you're right and he's off by 50%

Is a temperature rise of "only" 3C acceptable?

[Nederland]

15. I will worry about a 3C rise...

...when you show me some evidence that it might happen. Right now there is none.

[young_at_heart]

3. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry---

is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically.

This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest.

I don't know about you, I find find all this terrifying!

[GliderGuider]

4. People tend not to respond to abstract intellectual arguments, no matter how dire

People respond most strongly to immediate emotional arguments. That means that job losses in your own family today trump loss of life in the family of man ten years from now. Every time.

Politicians know this, which is why they so rarely deal in real facts. Instead they tend to spin the facts to create emotional arguments that will move people in the directions that give the politicians more power. Reality is the very last thing that politicians want to have to deal with - it's unspinnable, so they they can't depend on the outcome.

Sorry, thinking about this shit for a decade has left me irredeemably cynical.

[phantom power]

6. In his novel 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson referred to our time as "The Dithering"

[eppur_se_muova]

10. "a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe" ...

Umm, actually, if you express the probability as "one in 2.7 x 10⁹⁸", THAT is a big number. 3.7 x 10^-99 is an exquisitely small number, next to zero. [font size = big color=99]

[bananas]

13. I didn't see where he gave credit to the UK financial analysts

For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public.

I didn't see where he named them or linked to their analysis.
Who are they? Where is the analysis they published?